Almost just in time for the new web browser ballot screen in Windows 7, Opera Software released the final version of Opera 10.50, one of the most exciting releases in a while!

Although this is for the first time in years that Opera Software released their web browser for just one platform, as the Mac release is in beta, and the Linux version is still in pre-beta stage (available as snapshots). However sacrifices must be made sometimes in order to have miracles. And Opera 10.50 is a miracle. For the last couple of releases I've personally been a bit negative, but this one makes up for it, it truly does.

Carakan
At the heart of all the enthusiasm about this release is Carkan, the new JavaScript engine from the vikings. Simply put, when Presto came, it showed that they managed to create a completely fresh rendering engine within a short time frame, while Mozilla crawled along for years. And now, after all the fighting between Chrome, Safari and Firefox, there is now Opera 10.50 with Carakan that competes and even finishes off top dog Chrome's V8 in several benchmarks.

Private
Opera's browser was the frontrunner at introducing the well known "delete private data" functionality, but was left behind when Safari first introduced "private browsing", meaning it didn't store any private data once the functionality was activated. IE8, Chrome followed soon, while Firefox delayed the 3.5 release just for this. Opera was quite for a while, but now they've introduced it as it should, you can browse privately per tab or window, surpassing the competition in your ability to control it.

Engine talk
Of course Presto has been updated to support new standards (and upcoming standards). One of the most requested is support for CSS3 rounding of corners, which is now available in this release. But Presto is also assisted by Vega. Although previously it was thought to be hardware accelerated, Vega is currently running in software mode (don't worry hardware acceleration is still coming), and improves rendering of pages (and the UI) much better than before.

Platform integration
With Opera 10.50 you can see that they've worked on integrating with the platform it's running on. Most noticeable is the new Opera menu button in the top left corner that hosts all the standard menus. But also apparent is (when the personal bar is disabled) the new tab bar which shares space at the top of the browser, similar to Chrome (if it must be said). On Windows Vista and Windows 7 it looks even sexier with an all glass background, as many Firefox users want to have (emulated with add-ons). In a few words, Opera 10.50 looks better than IE, and is on par with Chrome.

Conclusion
Opera 10.50 is more than ever a big punch at the competition and shows that (with a 24 hour release candidate cycle) can produce a strong release when needed in a relative short time span. If you've used Opera before, or never, you should definitely try one of the fastest browsers out there.