Opera 11.10 releases after about a month in beta

Less than one month after arriving in beta, Opera 11.10 has been given a final release. One standout feature is an overhaul of Opera's Turbo function, which is designed to speed up browsing on slow networks such as dial-up connections, 3G networks and crowded WiFi hotspots.

Opera Turbo, which works by reducing the size of the web page being requested before its sent to the browser, now uses Google's new WebP image format. This helps speed up browsing further while better maintaining the quality of the page's images after compression. Opera claims that in testing the changes introduced in version 11.10 produce pages that are 35 percent smaller and subsequently 15 percent quicker to load than before.

For those who missed the beta release, Opera 11.10 also features a greatly improved Speed Dial feature. It now supports an unlimited number of dials thanks to a new button that allows the user to add his or her choice of sites to the list. To help facilitate this change, the Speed Dial layout is now customisable, and the user can choose a layout of between two and five columns. An improved zoom slider makes it practical to accommodate even five-column layouts on smaller displays.

Other changes are less prominent: the Flash plug-in is now installed automatically in the background the first time it's required, while there's added support for new web standards, including the WebP image format Opera has utilized to improve its Turbo feature.

Opera 11.10 is freeware, and available for PCs running Linux or Windows 2000 or later, plus Intel Macs (running OS X 10.4 or later).

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