Opera 12 Under the Hood: 64 bit, OoPP, HTML5 Drag and Drop, CSS3 Animations

Opera has never gotten the sort of attention and respect it deserves, at least judging by its paltry market share in most parts of the world. But the browser has always been on the cutting edge when it comes to web technologies and standards.

The latest release, Opera 12, isn't as much about pushing the boundaries as it's keeping up with Firefox and Chrome, though there a couple of places where it's taking the lead, access to webcams for example.

Out-of-process plugins

One of the big changes in Opera 12, though one you're not likely to notice very easily, is the fact that plugins are now relegated to their own process. This is called Out-of-Process Plugins (OOPP) and it's a smart feature to have in a browser.

The big advantage is that having plugins separated means they can do whatever they want, i.e. crash, and it won't affect the browser. Being that plugins, like Flash or Java, tend to be the most unstable piece in a browser, that's a good thing.

For Opera, there was another big incentive, with plugins in another process, it no longer matters whether the browser was 32-bit or 64-bit and the plugin wasn't. Which brings us to:

64 bit builds on Windows and Mac

Opera 12 is the first Opera to be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds, which means you can run it natively on your Windows 64.

That won't mean much, for the average user the performance gains are minimal and, in fact, the 64-bit version is going to use up a bit more memory, which is why the 32-bit Opera is still the default on Windows.

HTML5 drag and drop

Opera has always been at the forefront of support for new web technologies. HTML5 support is better with Opera 12 as it adds several new features.

A big one is support for drag-and-drop, which means that you'll be able to drag photos or documents from your desktop to upload them to a site or attach them to an email.

Unfortunately, you won't be able to use the feature in practice in many places, Google Images or Gmail for example, since these websites tend to not support Opera.

You can change the user agent if you really want drag and drop, and many other things you're missing out on, but it shouldn't have to be that way.

HTML5 getUserMedia (webcam access)

Opera 12 also boasts support for the HTML5 getUserMedia API which means that web apps can request access to your webcam via a standard way. You won't need any plugins or anything else for things like video chat or for taking webcam snapshots.

Where this will get really interesting is for video chat, but that's something for WebRTC to fix and it's going to be a while longer.

CSS3 animations

Opera has supported CSS3 transitions and 2D transforms for a while now, CSS3 animations are the next step.

They allow some impressive graphics and effects to be done entirely with CSS. It's not ready to replace Flash, but simple effects are easily implemented and with a much lower performance hit than using a Flash object.

Do Not Track

Opera 12 joins the Do Not Track movement and now supports the feature. Having the option enabled tells websites that you don't want to be tracked in any way, via cookies or other methods. It's up to the sites if they follow your request or not.

The option is disabled by default, as is the draft spec recommendation, but you can go to Preferences > Advanced > Security and enable "Ask websites not to track me." Firefox already supports the feature and IE10 will as well.

Hardware Acceleration and WebGL

These were supposed to be two star features in Opera 12. They're in there, mostly complete, but hardware acceleration is not faster than the software backend in many cases so it's disabled by default, which means that WebGL is disabled as well. You can read more about this here.

Opera:cpu and opera:gpu