Opera has always been packed with features, but it has yet to garner the same kind of publicity that Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome enjoy. And that's a shame, because version 10 of the venerable Web browser adds a slew of clever features that anyone who surfs the Web will welcome.

Like previous versions, Opera 10 is fast, configurable, and clean-looking--and it offers just about everything you'd expect in a modern browser, including a pop-up blocker, plug-ins, an RSS reader, and an antiphishing tool. Unlike competing browsers, it also has a surprisingly good built-in e-mail client, with support for POP3 and IMAP servers, the ability to create incoming message rules, and a spam filter. And, once again in this version, Opera bristles with features too numerous to mention in this short review, yet it packs them all into an elegant, simple-to-use interface.

The new features don't clutter up the browser or make it more difficult to use. Overall, Opera 10 is sleeker-looking than previous versions. But Opera's added beauty is more than skin-deep. Tab handling, for example, has improved, in that you can now configure the browser so that thumbnails of all of your tabs appear above each tab; the thumbnails are resizable as well.

Opera has always displayed pages quickly, and the newest version is even speedier, particularly on interactive sites that use a lot of resources, such as Facebook and Gmail. Opera claims a 40 percent increase in speed, but we couldn't verify that.

Among other new features are an inline spelling checker (which will be particularly welcome to bloggers) and Opera Turbo, a compression technology that Opera says will allow you to surf faster on slow connections, such as via dial-up. As a broadband user, I was not able to test this feature, so I can't vouch for it.

Surprisingly, given how many features Opera has, it still lacks one feature that IE, Firefox, and Chrome all have: a privacy mode that makes all traces of your Web-surfing session vanish after you close the browser. If such a feature is important to you, Opera isn't the best choice.

Should you replace your current browser with Opera? Which browser you use is a personal decision, so we can't give a one-size-fits-all answer. But anyone who has ever wished that their browser were faster and more feature-packed will certainly want to give Opera 10 a try.