You expect problems with beta versions of browsers but you certainly don't expect to have to wait up to a minute for a page to load. That's exactly what I discovered however when I tested the new 10.50 Opera beta today.

The irony is Opera have launched it with "The fastest browser on Earth" emblazoned across their site. Opera beta 10 simply did not work well for me at all. It took absolutely ages to display web pages and something was clearly wrong with the browser from the start. However, it did eventually display pages as evidenced here:

For what its worth, this version of Opera is supposedly significantly enhanced. The new Javascript engine is apparently 8 times faster, bolstered by its new Carakan Engine and Vega Graphics Library. Tabbed browsing has been encrypted to make it more secure and a smart address field has been added although this is something that has been available in most browsers for years now so I hardly think its anything to shout about.

Opera looks a bit better thanks to the implementation of Cocoa and Growl alerts are now finally supported. And Opera widgets work independently meaning they won't crash the browser itself. However, as detailed earlier, none of this really means anything if the browser simply doesn't work. I can only presume that Opera have severely misjudged something by releasing this beta version too early and until it's fixed, I recommend sticking with version 10.10.

Opera 10.50 beta may be Opera's fastest browser ever according to the developers but I've yet to see the evidence.