Opera 10.5 Beta Adds Private Browsing And Windows 7 Integration

Windows only: The latest beta version of the Opera browser adds total Windows 7 integration, with Jump Lists, Aero Peek, and a beautiful Aero Glass interface — and we’ve got a quick tour of all the new features.

The first thing you’ll notice after installing the 10.5 beta is that the interface has been completely re-done with Aero Glass for Windows 7 or Vista users. The menu bar has been rolled up into a single button similar to the way Office 2007 works, with easy access to all common functions all from one place.

Windows 7 users can now hover their mouse over the taskbar button and see previews of each of the open tabs, and moving your mouse over a specific tab will enable the Aero Peek effect and show the Opera window with the contents of that particular tab — just the way Internet Explorer 8 does. You can even middle-click on the thumbnail preview to close a tab.

The Jump List menu shows the items from your Speed Dial, lets you open a new tab, or start a new private browsing session in a separate tab. Once you’ve opened a new private tab — which you can also do by right-clicking on the new tab button on the right of the tab bar — the icon in the tab will change to indicate that you are in a private browsing session.

You can choose to open a separate window for private browsing, but being able to include that private tab without requiring a new window is a nice feature that you can’t currently do in any of the other mainstream browsers.

Opera 10.5 beta is a free download for Windows only; Unix and Mac builds will be available later this week.

Opera 10.5 Beta [Opera Desktop Team]