Norwegian company Opera Software has released Opera 12.00 just a few minutes ago. Opera users who start the browser on their system should see update notifications displayed to them in the next couple of hours. Those who do not want to wait that long can run a manual check for updates with a click on Opera > Help > Check for Updates. The update should then be picked up by the browser and downloaded automatically to the local system.
The announcement over at the Opera Desktop Team blog highlights twelve major changes in Opera 12 that Internet users may be interested in. Among them performance improvements during the start of the browser, hardware acceleration and faster loading of pages, improved stability with out-of-process plugins, and improved support for new technologies.
Here are all improvements that the development team has highlighted on the blog post.
- Faster startup with many tabs
- Out-of-Process plugins
- Experimental hardware acceleration and WebGL
- Opera:cpu
- Improved loading performance
- Improved performance on security connections
- RTL (Right-to-left languages)
- Improved HTML5 support
- Improved extensions support
- 64-bit Windows and Mac versions
- Do not track
- Improved address field suggestions.
Some of the features mentioned by the team need to be enabled before they become available in the browser.
Opera 12.00 is a big step for the web browser, especially in terms of performance improvements. HTML5 Test results have made a big jump overtaking Firefox in the process. While still behind Google Chrome and Maxthon, the score differences have been reduced considerably.
Opera has also made available 64-bit editions for all supported desktop operating system, something that neither Mozilla nor Google have managed to do just that if you discount development builds.
Download: http://www.opera.com/download/
Originally post by gHacks.net: http://www.ghacks.net/2012/06/14/opera-12-has-been-released/