Opera Software Opera 10

Another worthy addition is the new Speed Dial feature (pictured above). Speed Dial improves on Safari 4's similar Top Sites feature by virtue of being more configurable. You can customize the page that appears whenever you open a new tab in Opera so that anywhere from 4 to 24 of your favorite Web sites display as thumbnails. That way, you can more quickly get to the sites you visit most often, with a simple click on a thumbnail. The feature is turned on by default, and the settings seem to offer no way to turn it off--not that you'd want to, though, because it has no downside.

Opera has always displayed pages quickly, and the newest version is even speedier, particularly on interactive sites that use a lot of resources, such as Facebook and Gmail. Opera claims a 40 percent increase in speed, but we couldn't verify that.

Among other new features are an inline spelling checker (which will be particularly welcome to bloggers) and Opera Turbo, a compression technology that Opera says will allow you to surf faster on slow connections, such as via dial-up. As a broadband user, I was not able to test this feature, so I can't vouch for it.

Surprisingly, given how many features Opera has, it still lacks one feature that IE, Firefox, and Chrome all have: a privacy mode that makes all traces of your Web-surfing session vanish after you close the browser. If such a feature is important to you, Opera isn't the best choice.

Should you replace your current browser with Opera? Which browser you use is a personal decision, so we can't give a one-size-fits-all answer. But anyone who has ever wished that their browser were faster and more feature-packed will certainly want to give Opera 10 a try.