Jumat, 08 Juni 2012

One Year in the Making, Opera 12 Reaches Release Candidate Stage


It's been a very long wait, almost a year, but the new Opera 12 is almost here. The Norwegian software maker has made available the first release candidate of the long-awaited Opera 12.

This means that the latest and greatest Opera version, which comes with hardware acceleration, WebGL and plenty of other improvements, is good enough for anyone to test.

Opera 12 has been in beta for a while, but it has been in the works for almost a full year.

The plan was for it to be the next major release after Opera 11.50, but the ambitious undertaking that Opera 12 proved to be made it hard to get something ready for the general public fast enough.

Opera decided to release an interim version, Opera 11.60, which included some of the features planned for Opera 12 that were completed at the time.

Since then the team has been focusing on Opera 12 exclusively. The big new feature is hardware acceleration. It was a massive undertaking but Opera has pulled it off, it's the first browser to boast full hardware acceleration, top to bottom, for the UI and the content.

But, ironically perhaps, hardware acceleration, the reason for the big delay, won't be enabled by default in Opera 12.

The feature is working properly, there are no major problems with it, but it turns out that the older and very optimized Vega software backend is still faster than the hardware accelerated version in most if not all cases.

As such, enabling hardware acceleration would incur a performance penalty for most people defeating the whole point.

Even without hardware acceleration though, there's plenty to like about Opera 12, WebGL support now comes as standard and the browser also has support for some newer web technologies, from the HTMl5/CSS3 family.

Via: One Year in the Making, Opera 12 Reaches Release Candidate Stage

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