Opera 12 final version now available for download, not expected to take this long once Release Candidate is out, but some serious bugs stopped Opera 12 from entering into final release cycle from RC state, anyway after 6 RCs Opera 12 final is out now, any bugs considered less important will be fixed in next version of Opera. Opera has been working on Opera 12 since almost an year for now and today it has been released with Hardware Acceleration,WebGL and Do Not Track features. This major release adds support for new web standards such as WebRTC (Camera), HTML5 Drag and Drop, CSS 3 Animations and Transitions, Do-Not-Track and CSS Generated Content for Paged Media.
Opera 12 Faster, more stable with OOPP and Supports 64-bit
Opera starts up faster and renders pages faster even the secure pages also. Opera is quite stable when compared to previous versions with the introduction of Out-of-Process Plug-ins (OOPP)architecture. Now with OOPP all plugins like Java, Silverlight and Flash run in a separate process, Opera_Plugin_wrapper.exe, you can find this similar to Firefox’s Plug-in Container.exe. From now onwards Plugin content pages doesn’t crash Opera, when a plug-in like Flash crashes on a page, user has to reload the page for plugin content on the page to see active again. Since Opera added 64- bit support for Windows and Mac, OOPP also allows Opera to run 32-bit plug-ins on their 64-bit browser.
This release support themes, you can install light weight themes for Opera you don’t even need to restart the browser there after, you can also create your own theme for Opera with Opera Theme Creator also.
Camera Support: Opera 12 supports web cameras through Device APIs. Websites you visit can detect and request access to your Camera which you can allow or deny, you can try some demos on Photo Booth, polaroid, Color Picker, Explode and Speedo. An indicator will be shown on page (which you’ve already granted access) tells you whether the Camera is in use or not.
Privacy and Security settings of websites more clearly visible now before the domain name with color-coded badges. These security badges on pop up reveal details of site you’re on like whether it is using secured connection and status of security record of that site.
Hardware Acceleration,WebGL and Do Not Track Support
Significant features to tell in this release are HWA, WebGL and Do Not Track support. When HWA and WebGL are turned on using GPU Opera renders pages, browser UI fast. You can see this difference when you play games and other web applications, but Opera felt in some cases its not faster than their backend software rendering engine Vega, that’s why this version comes with HWA turned off by default. You can easily enable them, read this article for more details.
Privacy feature from Mozilla, Do Not Track in the news recently, DNT lets you opt-out of behavioral tracking from websites and ad companies. Users can enable DNT feature from Advanced Settings in Opera to avoid tracking from websites.
Opera supports four new right-to-left languages such as Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Hebrew. These language users can browse Opera in their native language. Support for Opera Unite, Widgets and Voice have been discontinued with this release and they’re disabled by default for new users and will be completely removed with the version release near ending of the year.
You can download Opera 12 final from here.
Isn’t there some way to disable this ludicrous ‘wrapper’ for plugins? Plugins like flash players and such used to be not too great a CPU load, and didn’t require much more ram than normal browser usage. Everything worked quite nicely.
Now, however, the moment there’s a plugin, like even a bit of flash video on a page, Opera loads this ‘wrapper’ dinosaur which eats every resource in sight and leaves my poor little machine with all the processing ability of a ZX81!
What is it lately, everyone thinks that rather than simply filtering out any code that crashes they’ll just run any piece of junk, but only inside of a pretend-computer ; a ‘virtual machine’ – so that when it DOES crash it’s just the simulation that needs to be restarted! Why not just use code that WORKS?
I now see exactly why there’s this current obsession with compelling everyone to let software houses run whatever code they feel like whenever they feel like it on any box they feel like hijacking – just by labelling it as an ‘update’.. The latest ‘update’ to Opera is the sort of program that no one in their right mind would prefer, not if they had the slightest degree of warning..
I’m either going to reverse engineer this wonderful ‘wrapper’ so that I can write a little chunk of code which just pretends to the browser that it’s ‘simulating’ a system, or I’m going to dig back through the older Opera versions until I find one that doesn’t insist on putting more layers between code and the processor than you’d find on the average pass-the-parcel box!
Dave J.