14 DAY TRIAL // In a blog post dated Tuesday, May 31, Opera Desktop Team member Haavard is proud to introduce version 11.50 Beta of their popular open source web browser, citing key enhancements like the new ‘Add Speed Dial’ window, Speed Dial extensions and, allegedly, new HTML5 features.
Responsible with QA/testing in the Desktop department at Opera, Haavard first and foremost extends a huge thanks to everyone who provided the Norwegian software company with feedback and comments during the pre-beta testing of Swordfish - the code name for this new Opera iteration.
He confirms that Opera 11.50, released earlier this morning, packs “several new things” that should be appreciated by avid users.
Opera’s tester begins by introducing the new Speed Dial extensions, password synchronization through Opera Link, and the Opera Next development channel.
The latter allows users to keep their main Opera installation, in order to have a separate testing environment, to avoid any data loss. Thumbs up for that!
Speed Dial has been improved with a new way to add content. The dialog window is now separated in two sections - one for sites, the other for extensions. Click the image to the left to get a good look at it.
Noticeably it has a translucent grey bezel making it look and feel like a native OS X element, though Opera 11.50 is far from being a natural on the Mac.
Admittedly, the browser is still in Beta. But with every promise from Oslo that HTML5 is getting improved, little to no differences are visible on Macintosh platforms, at least in our experience with the browser.
Sites that are chock full of HTML5 elements (like Apple’s, for instance), experience immense lag in scrolling, and zooming in and out.
And don’t even get me started on video. In the offset chance it even starts playing, users will find that fast forwarding or rewinding will almost always exhibit hiccups and freezes.
So, the next time we hear “our Core team has implemented a number of new HTML5 features”, we’d really like to see some visible improvements with that Presto engine for day-to-day browsing on the Mac.
Hopefully, the Opera Desktop Team will deliver the goods whenever they decide to roll out Opera 11.50 Final, as the rest of the newly added features are quite worthy of our appreciation.
