14 DAY TRIAL // Opera is gearing up for a great release with Opera 12, which is still in pre-alpha mode. Apart from the small but noticeable updates to the UI, the big changes are under the hood.
Opera 12 will be the first hardware accelerated Opera, the first to support WebGL out of the box and the first to come with the eagerly awaited, in some places, HTML5 parser dubbed Ragnarok.
With this update, Opera should be on par with all of the other big browsers and, in some cases, even outdo them.
Around the time Internet Explorer 9 was getting ready to launch, everything everyone talked about was hardware acceleration. And Microsoft loved it, since it had it and everyone else didn't.
Soon enough, browser makers scrambled to offer some hardware acceleration in their products as well. Eventually, both Firefox, as of Firefox 4, and Google Chrome have gotten support for hardware acceleration, to varying degrees.
To this day, the implementations are so different that "hardware acceleration" in Firefox, Chrome and IE means three rather different things, a direct comparison is pointless.
It gets worse since the browsers support different features on different operating systems, Firefox being the worst offender here.
Now Opera is throwing its hat into the ring, but its implementation is complete from the get go. Apparently, everything in Opera is accelerated, from the UI to the content. And it works on most operating systems, including Windows XP.
This sounds very promising, but the specifics are still missing, so we'll have to wait until Opera 12 is in better shape to know for sure.
The other big announcement for Opera 12 is support for WebGL, the hardware accelerated 3D graphics standard for the web. All important browsers, with the exception of Internet Explorer, support the standard.
Opera has been working on it for quite a while, but it is only now ready to debut its implementation in a stable, production ready version of the browser.
This should prove quite a boon to web gaming which is starting to look very interesting, with hardware accelerated 3D Flash on the one side, and WebGL on the other.