Opera Software released Opera 12 Beta for download today after the browser displayed stability after months of development and tweaking under the hood. Opera Software, the developer of this desktop browser, did a great job in making this free application alive through the years. While it hasn’t gained popularity like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it is among the most stable browsers available online. And the fact that the team behind this great browser arrived at the 12th version is evident that things are actually going better and better for Opera. Opera 12 Beta is out for evaluation. Millions of internet surfers are actually using this and if there are still undiscovered bugs, it is just a matter of time before somebody could encounter them and reports will be done.
There are tons of features and enhancements that come with this beta version. And it seems to me that the developers have already put in everything they could think of just to be able to deliver a bump to this browser in a bid to acquire more users. Basically, almost all the enhancements done are major, although there are also a lot of minor changes. But anyway, below are some of the key features that come with Opera 12 Beta.
Opera 12 Beta Key Features & Enhancements
Out-of-Process Plug-ins. In a bid to make the browser more stable and secure, the developers decided to make plug-ins a separate process from the browser. There are times when plug-ins misbehaves, and during that time when they are separate from the browser process, it would be a lot easier to shut them down and run them again without disrupting the processes of Opera 12.
Themes. The trending in the world of browsers is that bare browsers will surely get themes and skins to provide users different ambience or experience while browsing. Themes are also available for other major browsers and there is no way Opera 12 will be left behind. Giving a facelift to this browser will surely acquire more attention than it already has.
Address Field Enhancements. These are actually among the main focus of the development team. The address field was dramatically improved and the address bar now has better drop-down suggestions together with smart URL shortening feature. Both the page title and page excerpt would be utilized for full page search results. Furthermore, the page and URL content columns found in the address field drop-down have been combined.
Hardware Acceleration. While it is still in the experimental stage, Opera 12 Beta can now offload graphics rendering from the CPU to the GPU making the graphics load faster and the animations undisrupted. But since this feature is disabled by default, the user will have to enable it by setting EnableHardwareAcceleration to 1.
While some browsers still suffer from scripting errors and page load issues, Opera 12 Beta now enjoys being stable despite the fact that it is still not a final release. Once this beta version will be out for weeks, bugs will soon be fixed and issues be addressed. Hopefully, when the full version of Opera 12 will be released, there would no more bugs and problems considering even the beta have minimal issues.
