Opera 11.50 for Windows and Mac has now been released and although there's nothing outstandingly new in it, there's a few nice improvements and tweaks that make it faster than ever.

Opera 11.50 keeps the general design and functionality of the much lauded Opera 11.10, but adds convenient improved features to Speed Dial and adds Visual Tabs, Password Syncing across devices and a faster rendering engine.

The most notable improvement has been to Speed Dial which instead of simply giving easy access to your favorite sites, now allows you to embed your Speed Dial with dynamic information - in other words, web apps within Opera.

You can add new Speed Dial components, simply by searching and adding them within Opera:

You can also now configure Mouse Gestures to control browsing with your mouse more easily:

As regards speed, Opera has always been ultra-fast (faster than Chrome according to the developers) and the Opera 11.50 features the obligatory faster rendering engine for new updates.

A Password Syncing feature allows you to sync passwords across machines and devices - just sign-up for an account and Opera does the rest. Finally, there have also been some HTML5 improvements for developers such as Session History, Navigation and the W3C File API.

Opera is often overlooked in the browser wars but it has some really slick features that I really like. One of them is Another re is Visual Tab Browsing. Instead of having tabs by names, you can actually see the pages in the tabs. Although this isn't exactly essential, it certainly looks good although I'm not sure how good it looks when you've got a lot of tabs open.

Download Opera 11.50 for Windows and Opera 11.50 for Mac and see for yourself how far this veteran browser has come since all the way back in 1995.