Opera have announced the first beta release (preview) of version 11 of their browser.
Despite having been around for many years (the first version was released in 1996), and despite the fact that Opera has brought us many innovative features, its market share on the desktop remains low, consistently hovering around the 1% – 3% mark.
So why should you check out Opera 11?
Opera is fast
I’m not a fan of speed comparison tests – they are artificial and don’t reflect real life use – but in most tests, Opera compares favourably with its competitors. Opera claims that its browser is the fastest in the world, and although that’s a bold claim, some of the most common tests lend it some credence.
For example, Opera 11 currently clocks in around 10% faster than Chrome 9.0.587.0 on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.
However, I wouldn’t pay too much attention to speed tests for non-stable browser releases – it is likely that they will be refined prior to full public release in any case.
With that in mind, here are some of the features you should get excited about.
Tab Stacking
Browser tabs are a well-understood, popular mechanism for allowing users to manage the vast amounts of information available on the web.
Tab stacking has been introduced for the times when the user has so many tabs open that they can’t manage their browser window properly. This must be an increasingly common problem, as Firefox recently introduced Panorama to solve the same problem.
Anyway, here is Opera’s take on the problem.
Tab stacking has been implemented in an intuitive, easy to use fashion, and I’m sure it will turn out to be a popular feature.
Extension Support
Opera has at last allowed support for browser extensions. Although the number of extensions is small at the moment, I’m sure their number will grow rapidly. Writing extensions for Opera is easy, and will be looked at in a future blog post!
Technical Gubbins
Opera 11 Beta passed ACID3 with a score of 100/100, and includes some of the best support for HTML5 of any of the major browsers. It also includes support for some neat JavaScript features such as web workers, the geolocation API, and web storage.
In many ways, Opera is the opposite of Chrome; where Chrome takes a minimalist approach, Opera takes a kitchen-sink approach (even including a full mail client as standard!)
This approach might not be for everyone, but if you consider yourself a true internerd, you owe it to yourself to check out Opera 11.
We are delighted to welcome Gordon Campbell to our ranks this week.
