Opera version 10.10 launched today.  I’ve only tried it for a short period of time, but from what I can tell it’s about the same story as I had before: under OS X, it runs incredibly well, but in Linux, there are still some memory management and performance issues that still aren’t quite worked out.

Opera’s integrated email client, and Opera Link are two big boons to the browser which are not as closely built in via competitors.  This, and it’s consistently solid performance under OS X and Windows makes me really enjoy the experience.  10.10 from today also launches more support for Opera Unite: a service which adds a lot of wild functionality to the browser.

Opera Unite adds in a web server, file, video, and music sharing, a messenger, and various other services all in a coherent package.  These services are tied together via an Opera account, which is also used for Opera Link.  After tinkering with the options, it seems like Unite is a really interesting and potentially really useful concept, which I feel will most likely not catch on in the numbers that it could.  I personally don’t have a need for it, and I don’t think it’s huge enough to switch people over.  Personally, I wish they would attack the bloat in the Linux platform release rather than adding more features.

I don’t have much in terms of measurable results, though in OS X 10.10 does appear to run a very slight bit faster than its previous version: which is saying something, since 10.0 was always blazing fast for me.  With Firefox slowly creeping up in its share of the market, I don’t have a lot of high hopes that Opera will find any sort of dominance in the browser wars; though in many ways I wish it would, because it really is one hell of a good package.