Opera 11 Review,Feature and Download

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Opera 11 with Extensions Available

December 25th, 2010 yuda supriyanto add comment

The Latest browser from Opera Software, Opera 11, was introduced formally. Some new features including stacking tabs, this functionality allows the tabs are made just by clicking and dragging. Other changes include a clearer address bar and additional translation options. Opera 11 is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Opera 11 also has opened himself to the extensions. Thus, some additional functions which are developed by third parties can be found in Opera. Including, for example, extensions to download YouTube videos. Jon von Tetzchner, the founder of Opera, said that Opera is not the first to adopt extensions.

Some of the highlights of this release are:
1. Extensions: Opera 11 introduces a new API based on the W3C widget specification. This means that you can easily develop Opera extensions using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Opera’s implementation of extensions is similar to Chrome’s. Some of them work quietly in the background, while others have a user interface that is exposed through a button. There are already close to two hundred extensions in the official extensions gallery. The most popular extensions include an ad blocker, LastPass and a YouTube video downloader.

2. Tab Stacking: Tab clutter is a problem many web-addicts have to deal with. Once you have a couple of dozen or more tabs, the utility of tabbed browsing diminishes greatly as individual tabs become practically indistinguishable. Opera is trying to solve this issue through Tab Stacking. Tab Stacking makes it possible to group tabs by simply dragging and dropping tabs on top of each other. Opera also toyed around with the idea of enabling tab stacking in one of the snapshots. However, it was dropped in subsequent builds due to numerous inconsistencies and annoyances present in the initial implementation. Opera clearly believes that tabbed stacking is the future of browsing, and has promised to refine it further in future releases.

3. Visual Mouse Gestures: Opera is one of the few browsers to ship with inbuilt support for mouse gestures. Mouse gestures is the killer feature you never knew you needed. It allows you to perform actions like open links in new tab, reload, stop and close tabs with a flick of your mouse. Once you get the hang of it, you will find it hard to live without it. However, most users never discover this feature, as the only way to learn about gestures is to study the documentation or go through the Mouse gestures configuration. Opera 11 tries to fix this by introducing a slick user interface that appears on right-clicking on any portion of the page. This mouse gestures interface guides you through the basic gestures.

4. Safer and Cleaner Address Bar: Opera has tweaked the address bar to make it easier to spot phishing websites. The primary domain name is highlighted while protocols and parameters are hidden by default. It also prominently displays security information about the website you are browsing.

5. On-demand Plugin Loading: Now, it is possible to have Opera load plugins like Flash and Silverlight only when required. This actually acts as a very nifty flashblock, as flash videos are blocked by default, and can be loaded individually.

Other Changes include
1 New app-tab mode that shrinks and shifts pinned tabs to the left.
2 Inbuilt support for Google Suggest.
3 Improved rendering engine (presto).
4 New Mail panel.
5 New Bookmarks bar.
6 Support for WebSockets (disabled due to security concerns).

You can download Opera 11 for Windows, UNIX and Mac from www.opera.com.