The first beta release of Opera 11.10 ‘Barracuda’ is now available for download.

Speedier Speed dial

The most significant ‘new feature‘ present in the build is an enhanced Speed Dial.

This improved, dynamic revamp allows you to has as many speed dial entries as you like, automatically adjust the size so they fit on screen and, for quicker visual identification of sites, detects and displays a sites’ logo as the thumbnail rather than displaying a barely-legible version of the entire site.

It was Opera that first brought the speed-dial to the browser and, judging by the way these changes feel in use, is certainly still the king of them.

You can see those improvements in action below: –

Other changes present in Opera 11.10 include ‘seamless and automatic’ installation of Flash and native support for Google’s WebP image protocol.

Download

The beta release is available in an Ubuntu-friendly .deb package @ opera.com/browser/next