Opera 12 Adds Themes, Do Not Track, Hardware Acceleration

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.

Continue Reading: Camera Aware, Do Not Track>

Camera Awareness and Page Layouts
Continuing its tradition of innovating on the Web, Opera 12 now has support for some pretty slick new HTML5 and CSS3 capabilities. A website will be able to access your webcam and microphone using HTML5 or WebRTC (the Google-backed Real-Time Communications) rather than having to rely on plugins like Flash and Silverlight. This will make possible Web applications like games that involve your face, web video chat, or face-recognition applications. Opera has posted demo sites that take advantage of this: Photo Booth, Polaroid, and FaceKat.

Another way that this new version extends the Web's usefulness is through its support for the new CSS Generated Content for Paged Media. This pretty much turns the browser into an ereader, letting you page back and forth through content. It also allows floating illustrations and multi-column view. It's especially apt for mobile devices. Opera's CTO, Haakon Wium Lie, who also happens to be the creator of CSS itself, gave PCMag.com an early look at the pagination possibilities last fall.

Better Security and Privacy
All modern browsers now indicate the security level of the site you're visiting in the title bar using color coding. Opera 12 improves on this with its security badge, which shows whether a site is secure, trusted, being viewed in Turbo, or using your location info or webcam.

The new release also adds support for the Do Not Track privacy initiative. Like the online equivalent to Do Not Call lists, Do Not Track can tell sites that you don't want browsing information collected about you for advertisement profiling. You'd be amazed how complete a picture of you that Web marketing outfits can build based on placing call-home code on an array of sites. The Do Not Track method does expect the advertisers to honor your wishes. Internet Explorer's Tracking Protection goes further than this, actually blocking access from the profiling sites based on blacklist subscriptions. Chrome is the only major browser at this point with no Do Not Track support, though Google has stated that this will come .

Farewell to Unite and Widgets
Some of what's new in version 12 is about what's been trimmed rather than added. No longer will Opera include Unite, Widgets, and Voice—but the new Extensions capability will stay. Opera's vice president of product management for desktop, Jan Standal, told PCMag that three extension systems was just too many to maintain within one browser, and that adoption of extensions proper outstripped that of the other two. It is a bit sad that the revolutionary idea behind Unite—where the browser becomes the server—is approaching end of life. Widgets, which live outside the browser, always seemed like a stretch, with so many other widget platforms ready to serve the same purpose.

To try out the new version, head to www.opera.com. Installers are available for Windows XP and newer, Mac OS X Leopard or later, Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris. An international version now supports right-to-left fonts. You can also read our in-depth review of Opera, which we'll be updating to reflect the new version.

For more from Michael, follow him on Twitter @mikemuch.