Rabu, 05 September 2012

After Backing Down on Hardware Acceleration, Opera Disables Out-of-Process Plugins


Opera 12 was supposed to be big release. After all, fans waited for a year to get it. In fact, it took so long that Opera decided to put together all the features it completed and release Opera 11.60 as a stopgap.

The big engineering changes were left for Opera 12, things like full hardware acceleration, out of process plugins and 64-bit releases.

Since the Opera 12 release though, all of those big engineering improvements have proved, well, problematic, to the point where they've actually been disabled.

Leading up to Opera 12, the company announced that hardware acceleration would not be enabled by default.

It turned out that for all the might of the GPU, the hardware accelerated version of Opera was not faster than the plain old software accelerated one.

With no point in enabling a feature that may have added instability issues while also being slower, hardware acceleration was made an option.

But Opera 12 still launched with OOPP which isolates the plugins process from the main browser one. This isolation means that plugin crashes don't take down the entire browser and help make the browser a bit more secure.

More importantly, it allowed a native 64-bit Opera to run 32-bit plugins. Given that most plugins only come in 32-bit flavors, this meant that an official 64-bit Opera finally made sense.

But as early as Opera 12.02, a stability release, the OOPP feature had been disabled for the 32-bit version of Opera. The company said some users complained of freezes on pages with plugins and that the only short-term fix was to temporarily disable the feature entirely.

That was three weeks ago. Now, the latest Opera 12.50 dev build had OOPP disabled as well for the very same reason.

Opera is not making any promises of having the feature re-enabled by the time Opera 12.50 final comes out. OOPP will be re-enabled when the company is satisfied with the feature's stability, no matter how long it takes.

This may sound a bit harsh but, if two big features in Opera 12 aren't actually any good, what was the point of waiting a year for the release in the first place.

Via: After Backing Down on Hardware Acceleration, Opera Disables Out-of-Process Plugins

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