Opera has announced on Thursday the first alpha release of Opera 10, the next major version of the company's web browser. This is built on Opera's Presto 2.2 rendering engine and it includes some significant improvements to rendering and standards compliance. In addition, this represents an expansion in Opera's native support for CSS3 and HTML5, like support for RGBA colors in CSS, with styling effects as a result.

Another feature is the support for web fonts, one that enables web sites to load fonts from a path or URL. This way, web designers can use whatever fonts they want instead of being forced to rely on the fonts that are already available to users. Both Safari and Firefox web browsers  use this support.

Opera will support several font formats, including TTF, OTF and SVG. Furthermore, the Presto JavaScript engine got some improvements too, with a new faster RegExp implementation and support for the W3C selectors API, which provides a concise CSS-like syntax for selecting page elements in JavaScript.

Acid3 is a test devised by Ian Hickson, one which evaluates the renderer's compatibility with various advanced web standards. The Opera and WebKit developers' effort made the browser pass this test with 100/100. Opera has previously released a highly experimental technical preview of the renderer in order to publicly demonstrate its completion of the test.

Furthermore, the new browser has new features that improve the quality of the user experience, like the automatic update, which notifies users when new versions are available. With this new release, Opera is trying to keep up with Safari and Firefox, while also delivering rock-solid standards compliance to its end users. The software is available for download from the Opera web site.