Opera is usually a distant fifth place in our monthly browser roundups, but it still retains a group of vocal and active users. Those people are in for quite a few changes with Opera 12.10, the latest beta of which was released today: Retina Display support in OS X, touch support in Windows 7 and Windows 8, and a smattering of new APIs and Web standards are all included in the new browser, which is available here.

The changelog claims that work has been done to make Opera look better on all high-resolution displays. This holds true for Macs with Retina Displays—Opera 12.10 is nice and sharp while Opera 12.02 is blurry and pixelated. However, "all high-resolution displays" apparently doesn't extend to cover Windows machines: using Windows 7's 200 percent scaling mode, Opera 12.10 looks just as blurry as the old version (though to be fair Microsoft's own Internet Explorer seems to be the only current browser that renders text properly in this mode).

Opera doesn't yet come in a Metro flavor as Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will, but the new version adds basic touch support for the Windows 7 and Windows 8 desktops—this will make UI elements slightly larger to make them easier to interact with, and it also adds support for touch scrolling and pinching to zoom. Mountain Lion support is also added in the form of Notification Center compatibility and a new Share button that can send Web pages out via Twitter, Facebook, and other services and applications.

Under the hood, the new Opera beta joins both Chrome and Firefox in adding support for Google's SPDY protocol, which encrypts and compresses HTTP requests, responses, and other data to speed up browsing. SPDY is generally thought to be more secure than using HTTP (and less onerous than using HTTPS), though it has opened browsers that support it up to attack in the past. SPDY requires support on both the browser and the server side to operate.

The new browser version also gives extension developers access to several new APIs: the URL filter API will allow extensions that temporarily block users from visiting certain pages; the Context Menu API lets extensions add items to right-click menus; the Screenshots API lets extensions take screenshots of Web pages without also adding the browser's chrome and scrollbars; and the Resource Loader API will allow extensions to easily access other files within the extension package.

Finally, In the Web standards department, it also adds support for "unprefixed" CSS3 gradients, transitions, animations, and transforms, meaning that developers will no longer need to add a special -o- prefix to get this code to render properly in Opera, reducing the amount of browser-specific testing that must be performed. Support for the latest draft of the Fullscreen API, the Page Visibility API, the Web Sockets API, and ICC color profiles has also been added.

There's currently no word on when the beta will go stable, but this is the last of five Opera 12.10 beta candidates, so it should be relatively stable for testing, if not for mission-critical use.

Listing image by Andrew Cunningham