It looks like yesterday when Opera was all set to release version 9.5 with a brand new skin, and today Opera Developer blog wrote about the upcoming  Opera 10, which will use an all new and improved rendering engine.

Opera 10 will be powered by Opera Presto 2.2, which is the newest rendering engine for the Opera browser. It provides significant improvements in speed, performance and security.

Are you thinking, what I am thinking? Yes, the browser war never went down! It’s still on with Mozilla Firefox 3.1 and just-out-of beta, Google Chrome.

Coming back to the topic, I just installed Opera 10 and tried accessing Gmail and Facebook (two resource intensive pages) and boy, they were really fast! I was surprised to see how fast the page loaded without being a burden on computer resources. Another plus point of the new rendering engine is that now Sizzled Core works in Opera without any problems. Opera Presto 2.2 passed the Acid3 test with a 100/100 which brings in support for many new web fonts, and is ready for the next generation of Web apps!

Some of the most requested features in Opera, have also been added like the inline spell check, auto-updates and full HTML formatting in emails. Opera Dragonfly has also been updated for better debugging of web sites, and allows you to edit the DOM and inspect HTTP headers.

Opera 10 (final) is expected to roll out by the end of Q2 of 2009. So far, only an alpha version has been released for us to test drive and have a first look at the new rendering engine.

Download Opera 10 (Alpha version)