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Opera software released a new version of its flagship desktop browser Tuesday. Opera 10 arrives with a completely new look, numerous speed improvements and several new features, including a page-compression technology originally developed for the mobile-browser market.

If you’d like to take the new browser for a spin, head on over the to official site and download it. Opera 10 is a free download for all major platforms.

Opera has long been a third or fourth runner-up when it come to usage statistics. But despite its lack of popularity among users, Opera is the originator of many of the features we take for granted in web browsers today. Opera was the first browser to offer tabs, the first to use thumbnail-style page previews and the first to broadly support web standards, including many of the new features in HTML5.

Opera 10 continues that tradition with a couple of standout new features. The most noticeable is the new tab thumbnail view, which we looked at in some detail back when Opera 10 was still a beta release. Prior to version 10, Opera would offer a large thumbnail whenever you hovered your mouse over a tab. For Opera 10 this feature has been extended to include an optional, full-fledged tab toolbar.

To see the new toolbar, just grab the bottom of the tab bar and pull it down. Alternately you can move the tab bar to the right or left of the screen — perfect for widescreen monitors with plenty of horizontal real estate. The previews make tab switching considerably easier and if, like us, you rely on keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs, fear not — Opera’s long-standing ability to cycle through tabs in the order you’ve looked at them remains intact.

The other major new feature in Tuesday’s release is Opera Turbo, a page-compression tool that will prove invaluable for anyone working with a 3G network card. Turbo automatically detects when network speeds drop and begins shuttling web pages through one of Opera’s page-compressing proxy servers, so less data needs to be transferred. The resulting pages will function as normal, though images will be heavily compressed and sometimes non-essential page elements will require an extra click to access. It’s a feature the company initially set up for its mobile users (Opera is a major player in the mobile handset space with its Opera Mobile and Opera Mini browsers) but added it to Opera 10 due to its popularity. Anyone surfing on a limited connection at their desks will certainly appreciate it.

Opera has always been at the forefront of web standards support — all of its key products pass the most rigorous CSS and HTML layout tests, and the company even publishes a set of tutorials about writing standards-compliant code –  and this release keeps that tradition alive. Opera 10 uses the company’s Presto 2.2 rendering engine to draw pages, and it includes support for several HTML5 and CSS3 elements, including canvas, HTML5 forms and web fonts.

Bear in mind that two of the most recently hyped features for Opera, the Opera Unite personal web server and the new Carakan JavaScript engine, are not included in this release. The company hasn’t set a timeline for Unite, which is still an alpha release. But we expect to see Carakan, which the company claims makes JavaScript run two and a half times faster than the current engine, in the next major release.

Opera has long included a number things you won’t find in other browsers, like a built-in e-mail client and a BitTorrent client. The e-mail client gets a couple of improvements in Opera 10, including the ability to specify a webmail service’s “Compose” page as the default for creating new e-mail messages.

It’s curious that while the other browser makers are slimming down their software or offloading non-essential tasks to a plug-in framework, Opera continues to do neither. Remarkably, the company can still offer a full suite of web tools without the resulting package feeling bloated or sluggish.

Opera claims that version 10 is 40 percent faster than its predecessor. However, as our sister site Ars Technica discovered, Opera’s speed varies considerably depending on what OS you’re using. The short story is that, on Mac OS X, nothing, including Opera 10, can really touch Safari’s speed. But on the Windows side Opera 10 managed to best Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4, coming in only a few milliseconds behind Chrome in Ars’ tests. Opera 10 also uses considerably less RAM than Opera 9 (it also easily bested Firefox 3.5 in our informal testing).

Enhancements and bug fixes include the ability to customize Speed Dial (such as making a larger grid of thumbnails for those of you large monitors) and an improved spell-checking system that no longer requires Windows users to install additional dictionary software.

There are also some truly niche features, like Fast Forward, a set of controls that allows you to jump to the next page in a series of pages, or log in simply by hitting the forward button, and Dragonfly, a small suite of debuggers and DOM inspectors for web developers. These features, in conjunction with crowd pleasers like tab behaviors and Turbo, make Opera 10 well worth the upgrade for Opera fans.

If you’re not a convert yet, we recommend you give Opera a shot. It lacks the plug-in architecture of Firefox, but it has plenty of features even without it. And while it may not beat Safari on OS X or Chrome on Windows, Opera 10 is certainly no slouch when it comes to speed. Also keep in mind that Opera will likely get a huge speed boost soon once the new Carakan engine is ready to be included.