What the Opera browser lacks in market domination on the desktop, it makes up for in innovation, like being the first to offer a tabbed interface and built-in search. Eschewing the frequent upgrades employed by Google and Mozilla, major Opera updates come along once every two years, which translates to significant new features.
Today, with the launch of Opera 12, the Nordic software house has added a new Themes capability to dress up your browser, Do Not Track privacy support, and lots of performance enhancements. It also brings a couple of completely new ways to experience the Web involving your webcam and paged layouts, and HTML5 drag-and-drop.
"You spend hours each day in front of a Web browser," said Opera CEO Lars Boilesen. "Shouldn’t those hours be as fun and, occasionally, as productive as possible? We think so, so we made Opera 12 the smartest, fastest and most unique browser available. In a sea of browsers that look the same and act the same, isn’t it nice to know that you can get something better?”
Themes
Opera has for years been one of the most customizable browsers around: Its Skins feature goes as far as letting you change window border transparency and tab shapes—one even makes Opera look exactly like Chrome! But skinning is more of a geek option, while Themes, like those offered by Firefox and Chrome can be simple and fun for all. Like those, Opera's Themes are simply attractive background images and window border colors. A gallery of themes you can apply to Opera 12 is at addons.opera.com/en/themes. Thanks to the Opera 12 beta period, there are already hundreds of appealing themes from which to choose.
Faster Startup and Hardware Acceleration
Opera 12 brings limited hardware acceleration, that is, using your computer's powerful graphics processor to speed up Web page rendering. It's an opt-in beta feature now. Hardware acceleration was first pursued as a way to make browsers capable of running demanding application-like sites by Microsoft in Internet Explorer 9, and Firefox and Chrome have followed with their own implementations. Opera wants to make sure it works on all platforms including Windows XP. Chrome and Firefox already have this, while Internet Explorer 9 only runs on Windows 7 and Vista.
Another hardware and speed-demon feature added to Opera 12 is support for WebGL. This is the online version of OpenGL, a commonly used graphics language for 3D video games. Chrome and Firefox already support this. The support in Opera 12 is, like hardware acceleration, still experimental and not enabled by default.
On recent PCMag.com tests, Opera was among the slower browsers to get up and running, but this release addresses that issue, with new smarter tab loading. Page loading is also faster for both standard and encrypted SSL sites. It also adds support for 64-bit CPUs on Mac and Windows. This will make for even faster performance on computers with those processors. Opera uses a dynamic approach to memory use, which is why it never had Firefox's memory usage issues and why it does well on mobile platforms.
Opera Turbo, the company's unique Web speeder-upper that caches popular sites and sends them to the browser in compressed form—will remain an option in version 12. This is the technology that powers the Opera Mini mobile Web browser, making fast Web browsing possible over weak connections.
In more of a stability than a performance improvement, plugins will now be run in their own process, so that if one crashes, it doesn't affect the rest of your browsing session. Other browsers have made use of this technique, with Internet Explorer and Chrome going even further and also running tabs in separate processes.