Opera Software, the little Norwegian browser maker that pioneered many of the modern web browser features, has just released Opera 10.60. As suggested by the version number, the new build is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Opera 10.60 builds upon the 10.5x releases and polishes many of the significant changes introduced in the previous releases.

Visual Enhancements

Opera 10.60 refines the existing skin by making subtle but noticeable all-around adjustments. The hideous O-menu button has been replaced by a more civilized looking button. Hover thumbnail tab previews have been cleaned up and internal tabs (like Feeds, Mail, Notes and Downloads) have been graced with pretty looking icons. Also, Speed Dials now makes better utilization of the width afforded by wide-screen monitors.

Standard Support Enhancements

HTML5 has become quite the buzzword these days. Of course, thanks to the misleading usage by vendors like Apple, most people have come to associate HTML5 with any new web technology that is cool. That being said, Opera 10.60 truely delivers better HTML5 and other standards support. With this stable release, it becomes the first browser to support WebM videos. Also supported in this release are standards like Geolocation, Appcache and Web Workers. You can find more information on these new technologies here.

Performance Enhancements

Also included in Opera 10.60 is the customary speed improvement. I didn’t do any benchmarks with the final build, but Opera claims that the new build fares 50% better than it’s predecessor in some benchmarks. Earlier, Opera 10.60 alpha had managed to edge out Chrome’s dev channel releases.

Security Enhancements

Opera has added AVG anti fraud, malware and phishing feeds to beef up it’s phishing and malware protection feature. According to Opera, “Live feeds supply fresh information on the latest web threats to the users and keep them in the know about potential malware, harm or scams”. In certain regions, Opera will also be using data supplied by Yandex for fraud protection.

Other Enhancements

Live Search Suggestions are coming to Opera. For now, it works only with few search engines like Wikipedia. Hopefully, more search engines will be supported in the near future. Opera has also added Bing as an search option. Google remains the default search engine, but Bing will be used as the Speed Dial search engine.

This is also the first time UNIX users would get to try the significant enhancements introduced in Opera 10.50, since Opera was not offered in final version for the 10.5x series.

Opera 10.60 for Windows/Mac/UNIX can be downloaded from opera.com/browser/download. You can view real-time downloads of the browser in an interactive map available at opera.com/livemap.