Opera includes Unite feature with 10.10 browser release

Opera's powerful content sharing technology, Unite, has now been fully integrated into its desktop browser with the release of Opera 10.10. Opera lovers can also enjoy visual tabs to view thumbnails of pages in open tabs, a page-loading turbo boost, web navigation with mouse gestures and a customizable speed dial interface.

"We promised Opera Unite would reinvent the Web," said Opera's Jon von Tetzchner. "What we are really doing is reinventing how we as consumers interact with the Web. By giving our devices the ability to serve content, we become equal citizens on the Web. In an age where we have ceded control of our personal data to third-parties, Opera Unite gives us the freedom to choose how we will share the data that belongs to us."

Gizmag covered the release of Unite in June, but back then users had to download a special version of the browser to fully enjoy the power of incorporating both browser and content server in the same package. Opera 10.10 signals the first mainstream public release of the combined suite.

As you can see from the following video, users can now enjoy such things as photo sharing and media streaming directly from within the browser window:

Opera 10.10 also includes a feature which helps speed up network connections, offering users "eight-times-faster Web surfing over slow connections than other browsers". The video below shows how this Turbo boost works:

Visual tabs is a wonderful innovation, doing for tabs what Speed Dial did for bookmarks. We're all now familiar with tabs in browsers, Opera has expanded their usefulness by offering a thumbnail preview of opened tabs. This is useful if you're searching through images to accompany your article or even just looking for a quick way to find a familiar page amongst all those open tabs. The thumbnails are revealed by dragging a handle underneath the tabs and valuable page viewing space reclaimed similarly.

Browser information synchronization, email and feed integration, mouse gesture navigation control, a BitTorrent download manager, web developer tools, widgets and 256-bit encryption are just some of the other features packed into Opera 10.10.