With its British designer Jon Hicks-created new default casing and a refurbished Tab bar, the ‘Turbo-charged’ Opera 10 has entered beta. Equipped with robust features, the browser is set to become a speedy utility with its handling of browsing, e-mail, and RSS.

Boasting of improvements to Speed Dial and toolbar customizations, the Opera 10 Beta, with a rather placid architecturally-swayed blue background, is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The refreshed Speed Dial can be expanded to view almost 25 Web sites and set a background image. Customization has also been made easy, by right-clicking on any toolbar for the Customize option.

Hinting at its tacit aim of going past delivering the ‘mere browser’ experience, the Opera 10 Beta comes with its slow connections-specific Opera Turbo which, as per the company claims, “easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up.”

Furthermore, the Opera 10 beta has a single unified sidebar interface for Panels featuring the standard Notes, Bookmarks, History, and Transfers, with a Widgets option to download more panels that enable users to manage to their e-mail, newsfeeds, and chat. 

Among the more-visible changes in Opera is the tab bar with a bold black background to make the tabs stand out more clearly, along with the notably innovative slide-able thumbnail view of tabbed pages!