Chrome hunting by Opera 10.5 pre_alpha

Now latest Google browser has a new name in the list of competitors. Yes! new Chrome is hunted by new Opera 10.5 pre alpha.

Opera 10.5 pre-alpha introduces Windows 7 support and a slight re-design, along with a rocketing new JavaScript engine.
Empirical testing was done on an HP desktop running an Intel Core 2 Q6600 at 2.66GHz with 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 32-bit, the pre-alpha scored 435.6 milliseconds in the Sun Spider JavaScript benchmark. By contrast, Google Chrome 4.0.266.0 is the most recent development build, notched at 510.4 ms. The current stable build of Opera was more than 7.5 times slower, at 3284.4 ms.

Opera attributes its dramatic improvement to the new Carakan JavaScript engine, which they have designed from scratch to replace the Futhark engine in the stable build. Opera 10.5 also includes improvements to the Presto layout engine, and a new graphics library called Vega.
There are some known problems, including lack of printer support in the Mac version and noticeably high memory usage. Users can expect these to get addressed before the stable build of Opera 10.50 is released. The Opera 10.50 official announcement and changes can be read here, while the current stable version of Opera 10.10 is for Windows, Mac, and Linux.