Chrome has carved a niche in the browser market but hasn't squeezed Opera off the charts. Yandex.Browser is the next new contender.

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software has released its 12.10 beta version, designed for faster Web communications by supporting technologies including Google's SPDY and the Web Socket standard.

The new browser version, which had been known in earlier testing as version 12.50, adds some clout to Google's SPDY effort to make Web pages load faster. That effort got started with Chrome and arrived next in Mozilla's Firefox. SPDY is a variation on the Hypertext Tranfser Protocol, and its features are under consideration for a new version of the HTTP standard.

"Opera has always been about speed, so the new release incorporates the new SPDY protocol, which makes Web pages load faster on SPDY-enabled sites such as Twitter, Gmail, WordPress and (soon) Facebook," said Opera Web evangelist Bruce Lawson in a blog post today.

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