14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 12.02 is almost out the door, but Opera 12.50 is where the action is. The team is working on the next major release and the latest snapshot build, made available for testing, actually comes with a big list of new features, like support for the SPDY protocol.
Other new things are support for the FullScreen API and for ICC Profiles, along with a couple of new HTML5/CSS3 features.
The experimental Opera 12.50 snapshot now boasts support for the SPDY protocol, which is set to become HTTP2.0 in a couple of years or more.
Opera is building support for SPDY v3, the latest draft spec. Both Firefox and Chrome support v3 in the latest stable releases, Firefox 15, released yesterday, being the latest to boast support for it.
In several weeks, three major browsers will support SPDY which should make it viable even tempting for more sites to implement support for it. As the name suggests, SPDY aims to speed up the web via various optimizations and shortcuts to the ancient HTTP.
It was initially created by Google, which continues to lead development. It's supported by Google and Twitter and a growing number of smaller sites. Facebook is working on implementing it as well. In the meantime, SPDY seems the likely candidate to evolve into HTTP2.0, which is now being discussed.
The latest Opera 12.50 snapshot also comes with support for the Fullscreen API which, you guessed it, enables web apps to go full screen. This is useful for games, photo slideshows, presentations and various other apps.
Opera 12.50 adds support for color management, what's more, it does it with the latest ICC Profile v4 spec that few other browsers support.
Web developers will be interested to hear that Opera 12.50 comes with support for @media blocks that will eventually enable it to support CSS3 Conditional Rules. Also new is support for the "reversed" attribute for HTML5 ordered lists.