14 DAY TRIAL // For a while now, Opera fans have been waiting for the next major installment, Opera 12. It promises to be one of the biggest releases yet, bringing a number of new technologies, on top of the list being full hardware acceleration.
But as with any big release, progress has been rather slow and Opera 12 is still some way off from being completed.
Opera fans had resigned themselves to waiting, but then, out of the blue, came news of Opera 11.60, an interim release to keep things moving until Opera 12 is ready for launch.
Opera 11.60 was launched in experimental form about a week ago. The team plucked the features and technologies intended for Opera 12 that were basically complete and put together what will be Opera 11.60.
Since these features have been in the works for many months in some cases, there's not much development or testing left to do, so Opera 11.60 has already hit the beta stage. This means that Opera 11.60 stable is coming any time now.
Opera 11.60 may not be as exciting as Opera 12, but it's got some interesting features packed in. For one, it's got the eagerly anticipated, in some parts, Ragnarök HTML5 parser which should improve the quality of HTML5 pages, or at least their stability.
The Carakan JavaScript engine has been updated as well in the upcoming Opera 11.60, which is now in beta.
Another feature that developers will get more excited about than regular users is full support for the ECMAScript (JavaScript) 5.1 standard. More developer love is to be found in the support for CSS3 radial gradients, for better graphics on the web.
All of these features benefit users in the end, of course, but there are some updates that are going to be noticeable to non-developers as well. For example, the new Featherweight user interface has gotten some more tweaks, the address bar in particular.
Opera 11.60 also makes it easier to manage bookmarks by adopting a rather standard feature among browsers, the small star icon in the address box to bookmark/un-bookmark a page.
If you use Opera for its many built in tools, Opera 11.60 has some goodies for you as well, the email client has gotten a major revamp. The layout has been adapted for wider screens, the email list now includes the subject and the sender, on two different lines and you can group messages by several criteria.
If you're getting bored with your current Opera 11.52, maybe the new Opera 11.60 Beta is for you.
Opera for Windows is available for download here. Opera for Mac is available for download here. Opera for Linux is available for download here.