14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 12 is well underway now and promises to be quite an interesting release, with hardware acceleration and WebGL taking the spotlight. But Opera is already working on technologies beyond Opera 12, for example, native 64-bit builds on all platforms and out-of-process-plugins.
In Opera tradition, there is already an experimental build, ready for testing, incorporating both features.
Because these features probably won't make it in Opera 12, they've been included in an Opera Labs build, separate from the main development branch which is released as Opera Next.
In fact, you can install the latest Opera Labs release, with 64-bit support and OOPP, alongside Opera Next and they will remain separate.
"You might think we're all quiet here just before Christmas - but head over to Opera Labs to see where the party is at! We're releasing an early build of the work in progress that will eventually make Opera more stable, secure and faster," Opera wrote.
"Out-of-process plugins (OOPP) mean that Opera can shield itself from plugin crashes, and as a bonus we will be releasing 64-bit builds for Windows and Mac for the first time," it announced.
Opera has been working on native 64-bit builds for a while now. To date, only Internet Explorer and Safari are offered in 64-bit versions.
The benefits for regular users are the same as with other native 64-bit software, better performance in some cases, better stability and so on.
However, there's one problem unique to browsers that prevent most of them from releasing 64-bit versions, most browser plugins are built for 32-bit architectures.
One solution is to have the plugins run in a separate process, which is what Opera did. Plugins are run separate from the main process, ensuring that, for one, 32-bit plugins work, and that if a plugin crashes it doesn't take the whole browser with it.
It's the same solution that Firefox introduced along with Firefox 3.6. It ensures that the browser crashes a lot less than before, when a plugin fails, all that's needed is a tab refresh to get going again.
Note that these two features are for the Windows and Mac builds, Opera has had both a 64-bit version and a separate process for plugins on Linux/FreeBSD for a while.