Opera have today launched their offical first public beta of Opera 10.
An alpha release has been available for several months now and i have been using it every now and again to test new sites and a bit of general browsing and all in all its very good.

This latest version is very close to prying me away from Mozillas Firefox browser due to an improvement to the dragonfly developer tools.  Untill now they were about as good as Microsofts attempt at coping firebug, a good start but not that useful in locating and resolving faults. This new version is a hugh improment, mainly because of the ability to edit the DOM and view http headers.

There are a raft of new features available in Opera 10, from the expected improved UI and faster javascript engine to a feature similat to one used in Opera Mini called Turbo . This feature is the one that most people will be interested in. Opera Turbo is a compression technology which basically acts like a proxy but speeds up your connection by compressing the data stream before sending to your browser. On Opera mini this works great as mobile speeds on none 3G and GPRS phones are quite slow. Opera are building it into their desktop browser to improve connections on wireless devices like laptops and netbooks so your connection on the train or wi-fi cafe can be given a boost.

You can download and try it out here, aswell as read more on the bells and whistles opera are throwing into thier next incarnation. Remember this is a BETA release and so report any bugs you find to the man.