The Opera development team has just released version Opera 10.10 with full support for the Opera Unite feature which makes it possible to use web server features in the Opera web browser. A glimpse of things to come is now available in the form of Opera 10.20 alpha which has just been released by the seemingly never sleeping devs.
The main feature of this release will be the new widget behavior. Here is a short explanation if you are not familiar with Opera Widgets. Widgets to Opera are what add-ons are to Firefox. The main difference so far was the fact that widgets had to run in their own web browser window while add-ons did not. The other prerequisite was that Opera had to be open at all times for the widgets to show up.
This behavior changes with this new release of Opera. It is now possible to run widgets without Opera being open, pretty much the same way that widgets are used in Windows Vista and Windows 7. Opera calls this Opera widgets for desktop.
Concentration on this new feature becomes apparent on the first start of Opera 10.20 alpha. The welcome page displays a Twitter and Google Translate gadget which will redirect the user to the Opera widget repository. Launching a widget will now install it on the computer system. An icon will be placed in the start menu of the computer and it is now possible to run the widget without Opera running.
Opera needs to be installed on the computer system but it is theoretically possible to install and use the widgets without running Opera afterwards at all. This is however just a first implementation of the widget for desktop feature. Widgets can be installed to every location of the computer system. The announcement over at the Opera desktop team blog contains all the changes and known issues of this Opera 10.20 alpha release. The comments are worth reading as well. The blog post does contain download links for all supported operating systems as well.
Related posts:
- Opera Releases Happy New Year Build Of Opera 10.50 Pre-Alpha
- Opera 10.50 Alpha Released [Opera]
- Opera Widgets For Desktop
- Opera Dragonfly Alpha released
- Opera add-ons
- Opera 10 Release Candidate 2
- Opera 9.5 Mobile Beta 2
- Opera 10 Alpha Passes Acid 3 Test
Opera Widgets != Firefox Addons . While there’s some overlap, Firefox addons are basically extensions that can interact with the pages you are viewing (like GreaseMonkey or Opera’s userjs)or the user interface. Opera widgets are basically software applications running on something which we can call the Opera Runtime environment.
Then again if its an application, it should be able to run outside the browser. Thats what Opera has done this time. While most of Firefox’s addons have no similar motivation.
They actually call it the widget runtime. I hadn’t noticed that earlier.