Unexpected Opera 11.60 Comes with Ragnarök, a New Carakan, JavaScript 5.1 Compatibility

Opera has announced that it will have an intermediary release, before Opera 12 comes along, which will be labeled Opera 11.60, codenamed Tunny, which stands for Tuna.

It has now released a fist beta for it, but a final release should be coming soon, since most of what's left is bug fixing.

Opera has decided that there's still a lot more work to be done on Opera 12, since it's going to be quite a major release, however, some new features are basically done, so, rather than keep everyone waiting, Opera will ship whatever it has ready with Opera 11.6 and leave everything else for Opera 12.

"As you know the Wahoo snapshots already contain plenty of important Core updates, including great improvements in web standard support and hence have a big, positive impact on web site compatibility," Opera's Ruarí Ødegaard wrote.

"Most of these features are almost ready for every day use and just need a little bit of polishing," he said.

"However, other features including hardware acceleration still require a fair amount of work. Our ambitions for hardware acceleration are very high and we consider it more important to do it right, than to do it fast," he explained.

So, Opera gathered everything it believes was ready to go and put it in Opera 11.60. As a result the latest, and unexpected, Opera version packs quite a punch.

For one, it's got the brand new Ragnarök HTML5 parser that's got Opera fans, at least the more tech-savvy ones, all giddy for a few months now, since Opera announced.

Opera 11.60 will also include an updated version of Carakan, Opera's JavaScript engine which boasts improved memory performance especially for big applications.

The latest Opera also boasts full ECMAScript (JavaScript) 5.1 compatibility, putting Opera ahead of the pack in this aspect.

Other updates include support for CSS3 radial gradients, HTML5 custom scheme and content handlers and a new Featherweight address field and bookmark star menu.