Opera 10 maintains the program's tradition of striving for the fastest, smallest and most full-featured browser available. Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customisable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools and simple integration with email and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts and drag-and-drop functionality round out the essentials.

Opera's extras push it to among the top of the class. Integrated theme support previews themes from within the interface, and the new version sports a look that's an attractive balance between "dark" and "light" themes. Opera's desktop widgets can appear anywhere while Opera is running. The Password Manager utility (previously known as the Wand) combines auto fill with saved passwords, and it's hard to ignore the addition of torrent support and real-time fraud protection. Opera also includes reasonable anti-malware protection courtesy of Haute Secure.

There are other features that should make any non-believer do a double take. Opera Link enables Bookmarks, the Personal bar, Speed Dial and Notes synchronisation across all other Opera instances. Quick Find has improved the search tool, allowing for full text searching from the address field, the history panel, and opera:historysearch. We're also fans of the new inline spell checker that supports 51 languages.

Opera 10 expands on these features with Opera Turbo, a compression engine that Opera claims can compress data up to 80 per cent before squeezing it through Opera's servers. The optional Turbo mode is intended to help computers with slow data connections perform faster. There's also the new tab bar: double-click or pull down on the bar below the tabs and above the location bar and you get thumbnail previews of each tab. It has also finally received an autoupdater and integrated crash reporting. Opera undoubtedly has what it takes to unseat even the biggest-name browsers. You just need to hear it sing.