Opera 11.60 'Tunny' Released With Ragnarök HT
First time accepted submitter iZarKe writes "Version 11.60 of Opera Browser for Desktop was released today. Significant changes: the inclusion of their new HTML5 rendering engine "Ragnarök", a revamped address bar, full ECMAScript 5.1 support, support for CSS3 Radial Gradients (finally), and a very revamped Mail panel. Originally, these features were set to be released with their next major version, 12.00. However, due to more work needed for the hardware acceleration feature also to be included in Opera 12, the 11.60 intermediary release came to be, as they didn't want to hold back the other new features for that long a time."
Known issues
Flash Player 11 crashes on Mac. We recommend disabling it or downgrading for the time being.
Being the default browser of dozens of smartphones, selling themselves on the Wii console, etc.?
Opera make more than enough to keep themselves going, even if you can't "see" it. Hell, their entire Opera Link & Opera Turbo facilities must cost a bomb to run as it is. They'd have gone under long ago if they weren't making money.
Release notes are always better when sung to a festive tune http://youtu.be/4TlPU0QWv6g [Opera's Bruce Lawson giving a moving rendition of 11.60]
Please define "doesn't work".
I just navigated there, clicked on the sliding fancy menus, clicked on a video, played it, etc. and couldn't see anything that "didn't" work.
Nor could I spot anything wrong before I installed this version of Opera this morning, and have been using Youtube with Opera for years. I don't even do anything like user-agent faking any more (haven't needed that for years now).
What does it matter? If you don't want to use it, it never gets in the way. And no, it doesn't add to bloat either, Opera is really fast and lightweight. This means also their own "extensions" are since they're all coded by the same team and integrated. Of course, now a days there's real extensions too, so if you need something, you can install it really easily. And they don't break with every new version like with Firefox.
I've been using Opera for many, many years and they are constantly innovating. The were the first browser that I know of with tabbed browsing, the first with the speed dial, among many other features. The browser has a built in mail client, which I use mainly for reading RSS feeds, which is nice because it keeps the entire history of the feed, and it also has a built in BitTorrent client, which has been convenient on a few occasions when sites have BitTorrent download links. It supports extensions, but they aren't quite as advanced as Firefox extensions, although from a security standpoint that might be a good thing and installing them doesn't require a browser restart. Opera Link is great for syncing up your bookmarks, history, speed dial, etc with all your other Opera browsers (desktop and laptop for example). Opera Turbo is similar to Amazon's Silk browser feature to use a compressing proxy, although Opera Turbo can actually detect a slow connection and only use the feature when it needs to and then only when it is turned on. I haven't really messed with Opera Unite, but it seems like a pretty cool feature which allows you to basically set up a limited web server on your own computer for sharing files, broadcasting a web cam, accessing your home media library remotely, among other things. Back in the day I had to have another browser on standby because there were many pages Opera didn't work with, now it is very rare to find pages that don't work with Opera, plus Opera supports masking the browser as IE and Firefox for those pages that perform browser checking and tell you that your using an unsupported browser.
If you haven't tried Opera, give it a try, you might be pleasantly surprised at how advanced and slick it is.
Gestures. Use the mouse to back, forward, close tabs, open tabs, refresh, etc
Fast. The back button reloads the page from cache - without having to re-post form data!! (duh, chrome)
Tabs - the tab state is saved - even if you suddenly pull the power cable from the back of your computer
Never let a mediocre career stand in the way of a good time
I was under the impression (read on slashdot, so YMMGV) that Adblocking on opera was sub-par (still requested the ad, and just hid it, etc... rather than blocking it completely)?
Nope, Opera doesn't download blocked content, I just checked using Dragonfly (the built in developer tool). Blocked content only shows up as downloaded once you go to the visual click-to-block option, to allow you to see exactly what is and isn't blocked. Otherwise, in normal browsing, it doesn't download it.
Can't speak about Noscript, as I've never used it, but there does seem to be a similar extension in Opera. PasswordMaker has an Opera Widget (which is slightly less convenient than an extension), but there is another proper extension (Password Hasher) that seems to work the exact same way. I just use LastPass, though.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton