“Bloody hell”. I actually said that out loud whilst testing the new version of Opera’s browser ‘Opera Next’ (http://www.opera.com/developer/next) I would post a video of it installing, but it would only be about three seconds long!

I’m not normally a fan of Opera (apart from their mobile emulator – that’s brilliant!) However, this version of Opera uses the Chrome rendering engine, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

It starts up quicker than both Chrome (which has become something of a sloth recently) and IE10 (surprising) and presents you with a lovely ‘speed dial’ interface which looks basically the same as Chrome’s new tab page. Everywhere you type, Google Instant works and is.. instant! A refreshing change.

There’s a Firefox-esq ‘Opera’ button in the top left which launches the main menu with options ranging from the standard ‘New Tab’ to ‘Off Road Mode’. This apparently uses Opera servers to serve you a compressed version of the website you’re looking for (+1 for Star Wars reference?). Seems a tad dodgy if you ask me, although when looking at secure pages, this option did seem to disable itself – so perhaps not too much of a privacy issue (especially when browsing Facebook in HTTPS mode.. which you are, right?!)

Finally, because this version uses the Chrome rendering engine Opera have also included the Chrome development tools, which whilst not as good as Firefox ones, still are fairly useful.