14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 11 has reached the beta stage of development today and brings long-awaiting features like extensions or higher control over plug-ins to early adopters.
Despite maintaining a modest market share, Opera has always been at top when it comes to innovating, being directly responsible for many features seen in modern browsers today.
That being said, there are, however, some areas where Opera has fallen behind its competition and the availability of third-party-developed add-ons is certainly one of them.
Flexibility was one of the reasons that made Firefox so successful. Mozilla offers a solid foundation upon which others can build and extend the functionality.
Users can then take the pieces they want and combine them to get the best browsing experience for their particular needs.
Opera 11 promises to offer this too via a new extensions API, which was first made available for testing in the alpha build.
The API is not yet as powerful as Firefox's, but in some ways the implementation is better. Opera extensions don't require a browser restart when they are installed or uninstalled.
The beta version brings several improvements to extensions including an auto-update mechanism, a preferences page, a developer mode for debugging and the ability to use them on sites with encrypted connections (HTTPS).
There are currently 131 extensions in the official catalog, the most popular of which is called NoAds and describes itself as NoScript + AdBlock.
It's doubtful that it has all features of NoScript, which is capable of protecting against numerous types of Web attacks, or even those of AdBlock, but it's a start.
In fact, the new Opera 11 implements a NoScript feature natively – enabling plug-ins on-demand. This is also supported in Chrome for Flash content.
Opening a page with a lot of dynamic content (interactive ads and so on), can seriously impact performance, especially on systems with more limited resources.
People can use the new option, available under "Preferences > Content > Enable plug-ins only on demand," to selectively allow, for example, only one of several Flash videos to load on a page.
There are also some other neat new features in Opera 11, such as stacking, which we more thoroughly covered here.
The new Opera 11 Beta for Windows can be downloaded from here.