Opera 10 alpha shows off new Presto rendering engine

The Opera team has unveiled an alpha version of its Opera 10 browser, intended to show off the speed and feature support of the new Presto 2.2 rendering engine.

The first public preview of Opera 10 is available for download now, and a first look chiefly shows off the rendering speed of Presto 2.2 on resource-intensive sites. The browser quickly passes the Acid 3 Test, a feat that Opera first accomplished just this year. In BetaNews tests this afternoon, neither Firefox 3 nor Google's Chrome browser could pass.

Also key to this release are the additional Web standards Presto now supports. These include Web Fonts, the CSS 3 module for using custom fonts on a Web page that may not be available on a visitor's computer. Support for Alpha transparency and "color: transparent" settings has also been added.

For users, this early build of Opera 10 has added inline spell checking in certain fields, such as Facebook wall comments, and an auto-update function that keeps the browser build current when opted on.

Opera Mail, meanwhile, now supports either full HTML formatting or plaintext in e-mails, and the Dragonfly debugging tool has been improved to allow DOM editing and HTTP header inspection.