The newest Opera release for the Mac packs in a number of under-the-hood optimizations that led to a significant speed increase. It also supports multi-touch gestures on trackpads, HTML5 web videos, Growl notifications, and more.
Opera 10.52 for Mac is a native Cocoa application that the developer claims runs ten times faster than the previous Mac version, Opera 10.10.
It owes this speed upgrade to a new graphic library called Vega that provides a faster and smoother browsing and a new Javascript engine–Carakan–that replaced the Futhark engine from previous versions.
Opera 10.52 is also optimized for the Mac look-and-feel with a unified toolbar and supports SVG graphics and the latest web technologies, namely CSS and HTML5, including the <video> tag that a growing number of web developers are using to embed videos inside web pages that play without any sort of browser plugin.
If you own a Mac notebook, you’ll appreciate Opera’s support for multi-touch trackpad gestures that lets you pinch to zoom in and out of pages, scroll with two fingers, and navigate back and forth with three fingers. Opera Turbo, the technology that compresses web pages delivered to your computer, is also part of the deal, especially handy when you’re browsing the web on a cellular network.
Opera Software claims that the technology results in up to 50 percent and 65 percent faster browsing on 3G and Edge networks, respectively. Another nice addition is the support for cool Growl notifications based on a free third-party framework supported in many Mac applications.
You can get the 14MB Opera 10.52 download for either Intel- or PowerPC-based Macs here. Surprisingly, Opera 10.52 runs on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger as well. Windows and Linux versions have also been updated to version 10.52 (more in changelog).
Read more in Opera Software’s press release
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