Still, Mac users that run the Mac Os 10.7 Lion operating system get support for the new full screen application mode introduced in the OS by Apple.

The changelog lists several crash and stability related fixes. This includes a fix that drops the cpu utilization of Opera’s extension manager and several Speed Dial related crashes on some user systems.

The new version furthermore fixes several usability issues, like toolbar buttons that were no longer showing up in Opera’s user interface.

Opera 11.51 fixes two security issues. First an issue “that could allow unsecured web content to appear secure” and second an undisclosed low severity issue.

The new version of the Opera web browser is already available via the browser’s internal updating mechanism. Users can check for new updates via Opera > Help > Check for Updates. The browser should however pick up the new version automatically by the time of writing.

New users and users who do not want to update the browser via its updating tool can download the latest version from the official Opera website.

The next release as it stands now will be Opera 12.00, a new version that is likely to ship with new features and improvements. This includes speed improvements and better network latency. Opera confirmed that users might see page loading in half the time as before, especially on poor network connections or when connecting to web servers hosted on a different continent.

Opera Software regardless of that is about to release an update for the latest stable version of the Internet browser. You may recall that Opera is currently working on two different versions of the browser: First on Opera 12 the next big release and then on the maintenance release Opera 11.51 which all stable users can update to.

Opera 11.51 will be a maintenance release that improves the browser’s stability on all supported platforms. Opera’s plan is to release Opera 11.51 before the next big version Opera 12.00.

The developers right now have released the release candidate of Opera 11.51 on the official Opera Desktop Team blog. This indicates that a release of the final version of Opera 11.51 is imminent.

The change log lists several crash fixes, for instance a crash on Macs when opening Opera Dragonfly, or a crash on all systems when marking e-mail messages as “not spam”.

Opera users should not expect new features from the release, as it is only being pushed out to resolve issues that users have under Opera 11.50.

It needs to be noted that Opera 11.51 will upgrade Opera 11.50 on the system when installed. The release won’t touch a Opera Next version that is installed on the system.

Most users should probably wait for the final release before they update their web browser. That is, unless they work with Opera and experience one of the issues that version 11.51 fixes.

Opera 11.50 users can download Opera 11.51 Release Candidate from the Opera website.

This is a security and stability upgrade. Opera users are therefor encouraged to update their version of Opera as soon as possible to improve the stability and security of their browser.

The changelog lists several crash fixes and a single security issue.

Fixed an issue with framesets that could allow execution of arbitrary code

Some fixes of Opera 11.11 are site related, including fixes for Wikipedia, Google Calendar, Falk.de and sites that are using a specific certificate.

The internal update checker may not be able to pick up the new version right away. It is therefor recommended to check for updates manually in the web browser.

You do that with a click on Menu > Help > Check for Updates.

Opera had problems identifying my client version, and offered downloads of the desktop and mobile version of Opera.

You only have to select Download and Install if you get that screen as well. It is not necessary to make a choice on the screen.

Make sure you check the version after installation of the update. You can do that with a click on the Menu and the selection of Help > About Opera, or by entering opera:about in the Opera address bar and pressing enter afterwards.

Opera Next can be run alongside Opera stable on the same computer. The Next builds update automatically whenever a new snapshot build is released by Opera (with options to disable that).

Opera Next can be easily distinguished from Opera stable releases; The menu background color is blue instead of red.

Opera Next will automatically download and install all new builds released by Opera Software. Some users may prefer to only download alpha, beta, release candidate and final builds. For this, they need to disable the Download All Snapshots options in the Opera Configuration by clicking on this link and removing the checkmark from the Download All Snapshots parameter.

The Opera Next builds are completely independent from stable Opera installations, unless you configure them otherwise. You could for instance use Opera Link to synchronize data between both versions.

Opera Next is an entirely separate product to the official Opera browser product, which is the stable product intended for day-to-day use. There is no connection or interaction between them unless you manually configure this; all preferences and settings are saved for each product individually. For example, a bookmark saved in Opera Next will not display in your primary Opera browser. This ensures that your valuable data and settings remain untouched when you try out our latest changes.

The first Opera Next build is an Opera 11.50 alpha build which introduces two new features to the web browser.

Opera Link, Opera’s synchronization service, gets password synchronization, a feature that was long requested by the Opera community.

The new password synchronization is not automatically enabled. New Opera Link users who setup synchronization for the first time can enable password synchronization during setup. Existing users need to select Menu > Synchronize Opera > Configure to add Passwords to the synchronized data.

The second feature in the Opera Next release is an extensions engine for Speed Dial. Speed Dial extensions can be used by developers “to make live previews of web pages” or add “other nice decorations” to Speed Dial.

Three sample extensions have been created by Opera, including a live feed and weather report right on the speed dial page.

A tutorial is offered at Opera Dev for developers who would like to create Speed Dial extensions.

Interested users can download Opera Next from the Next page over at Opera Software. It is available for all desktop operating systems Opera runs on.

Opera has made the Speed Dial page more dynamic. The web page previews have been improved quality wise, and they can now show live contents for websites next to static contents.

Speed Dial fits the browser window dynamically now to make use of all the free space. Add to that the removal of the hard limit of Speed Dial entries and you got a dynamic listing of all your favorite sites on the new tab page.

Take a look at the video below to see the new Speed Dial in action.

But Speed Dial is just one of the improved features of Opera 11.10. Support for web standards has been improved.

The developers have for instance added support for linear CSS3 gradients and multiple columns, as well as the WebP image format that promises smaller file sizes than jpg images while retaining a similar quality level (A test study by Google of 900k images saw an average size reduction of about 40%)

Opera Software started to make changes to the user interface by switching to the new format YAML which promises to get rid of some of the current user interface limitations. Check out one of the snapshot posts over at the Opera Desktop blog for additional information on that subject.

A final change is the added option to install browser plug-ins seamlessly and automatically. Only Adobe’s Flash Plugin is supported for now, with the likelihood that additional plugins will follow in later releases.

Opera displays a notification at the top of the page that informs you about the missing plugin. It reads: “Plug-in missing: You need to install Adobe Flash Player to view this page”. Options available are to discard the notification, install the plug-in or select never for this plug-in to stop notifications for that plugin to appear in the browser.

A click on Install Plug-in launches the Adobe Flash Player installer which downloads and installs the plugin automatically.

Some quick benchmark results

• Opera 11.10 scores a 100/100 score on the Acid 3 test.
• The browser completed the sunspider JavaScript benchmark in 223.4ms, Google Chrome 11 dev was slightly slower 231.8ms.
• Opera 11.10 scored a 244 and 7 Bonus points out of 400 total points at the HTML5 Test, Google Chrome 11 dev scored 293 and 13 bonus points.

Closing Words

Opera 11.10 shows great promise. You should however remember that it is a beta release and as such not suited for productive environments. Interested users can download the Opera 11.10 Beta from Opera Next.

The changelogs list numerous fixes for bugs that caused crashes in the web browser, including installer fixes and site specific issues that include fixes for popular sites such as Facebook or Vkontakte.

Users who dig deeper find several improvements as well. The team has for instance fixed various mouse gesture sensitivity and recognition issues or the option top open the Mail Panel as a tab when only feeds are used.

The full changelogs are linked from the blog post announcing the new release.

The security issues that have been fixed in Opera 11.01 are the following:

• Removed support for “javascript:” URLs in CSS -o-link values, to make it easier for sites to filter untrusted CSS.
• Fixed an issue where large form inputs could allow execution of arbitrary code.
• Fixed an issue which made it possible to carry out clickjacking attacks against internal opera: URLs;
• Fixed issues which allowed web pages to gain limited access to files on the user’s computer;
• Fixed an issue where email passwords were not immediately deleted when deleting private data;
• Fixed an issue which could cause the wrong executable to be used to display a downloaded file in its folder

Opera 11.01 is a recommended update for every Opera 11 user. It is possible to update the web browser directly by clicking on Help > Menu > Check for Updates.

The latest version of Opera can also be downloaded directly from Opera Software.

Lets take a look at the download and installation process before we take a closer look at the extensions available.

Opera 11 alpha is available directly from Opera software for all supported operating systems. Only the windows version is directly available for download on Opera Next, the Mac OS X and Linux versions can be downloaded from Opera’s Snapshot server. All versions are currently only available in English.

The advanced options in the installation dialog offer the interesting option to install Opera 11 on an external device, which basically means that it is possible to install a portable version of Opera without third party tools. It is recommended to either install Opera as a portable version, or backup the current installation of Opera if available as a precaution to be prepared for all eventualities. It is an alpha version after all.

Opera extensions will be automatically opened on the first startup. There are currently 14 extensions available for installation, among them typical extensions like a Youtube video downloader, configurator or translation extension.

Extensions are installed by clicking on the Install button, then ok in the prompt that is displayed. Opera 11 extensions require no restart of the browser after installation, they are immediately available and functional.

A click on Menu > Extensions > Manage Extensions opens a list of all installed extensions, with options to disable or uninstall them. This process does not require a restart either, which is very comfortable and similar to how Google Chrome handles this.

There are other similarities. Extensions can place an icon in the browser toolbar if needed, and if that is the case they can be uninstalled or managed directly from there with a right-click.

The extensions do not seem to have options at this point in time. It is however likely that this will be changed in upcoming versions.

Here is a list of all available extensions up until now:

• Opera Configurator – Full control of your opera settings just 1 click away.
• FastestTube – YouTube Video Downloader – Download any video from YouTube!
• Mouse trail – This extension show red tail behind cursor in mouse gestures
• Translate – Automagically translate foreign web pages into
• Reddited – Has this page been on reddit?
• VideoFullscreen – View HTML5 videos in fullscreen.
• Edit the Page – Edit the page like a WYSIWYG editor
• External Scripts – noscript,noscript,script,external,
• YR.no forecast – No bells and whistles, just your forecast, right in your browser. Simple. Clean. Efficient.
• miniFeed – Facebook feed in a click
• Bit.ly Extension – Shorten URLs using the Bit.ly URL
• Opera to Phone – Adds a button to Opera that lets you seamlessly push links, maps, youtube videos, phone numbers and text to copy to the clipboard directly to your
• Delicious Extension – Save on delicious!
• Slashdotty – Hide Slashdot side blocks you don’t need.
• FaceChat – FaceChat – Facebook Chat from your browser!

With extensions available, it is only a matter of time until all popular Firefox add-ons and Google Chrome extensions get ported to Opera. Just waiting for Last Pass and NoScript. If both are doable and Opera 11 gets out of alpha and beta then it is bye bye Firefox and hello Opera.

Opera Software did good to copy most of the extension functionality from Google Chrome. Things like not having to restart the browser when installing or uninstalling extensions is a big plus. Yes, Firefox wants to do the same but that may take a while until it gets coded into the browser.

Opera 11 introduces several additional features, including an option to enable plug-ins only on demand. This feature is disabled by default, and needs to be activated in Menu > Options > Advanced > Content > Enable plug-ins only on demand.

A big play button is displayed on Flash contents after enabling the option. Flash is not loaded until that button is pressed.

These new additional features have been announced:

A new mail panel gives you control over the order in which your accounts and mail items show up. You can just drag items where you want them. You can also now create folders for organizing your mail and newsfeeds. A smart behavior is now implemented that can show the mail panel when you are using it, and hide it when you leave a mail tab.

A new bookmarks bar can be enabled that has replaced the personal bar. This conveniently located toolbar allows quick access to your favorite bookmarks.

To offer the latest support for rich, dynamic web applications, Opera 11 alpha supports HTML5 server-sent events and websockets. Server-sent events allow a server to push notifications and new content to the browser in real time, while websockets allow for sophisticated communication within web applications that can allow for rich next-generation web applications and multiplayer games

Opera 11 alpha feels pretty stable at this point. Let me know what you think of the browser if you have tried it as well. This is similar to Google Chrome’s Click to play option.

Opera 10.62 is a security and stability update, and therefor recommended for all users of the 10.6x branch. This release fixes for instance the recently discovered dll hijack vulnerability in Windows. The majority of enhancements improves the stability of the browser. The team has fixed several issues where Opera would unexpectedly close, for instance when searching on websites or while viewing bodyless documents in accessibility mode.

The team has also fixed the missing images bug in free previews and added fastmail and hotmail UK to the email auto configuration in Opera Mail.

Interested users can take a closer look at the changelogs, which are linked from the announcement post over at the desktop team blog.

Opera 10.62 is as usual available for all supported operating systems. Downloads are provided at the Opera website. Users who are already running a version of Opera 10.6x can also update the browser by clicking on Help > Check for Updates.

The issue became even more confusing as build numbers did not add up on first glance. Some build numbers of Opera 10.61 releases were higher than those of Opera 10.70 releases.

Confusing to say the least. A recent blog post over at the Opera blog sheds some light on the issue.

Opera is apparently developing two different versions of the browser at the same time. Opera 10.61, the next upcoming release will be a security and bugfix release. It won’t contain new features and a release is imminent.

Opera 10.70 is the major development branch that will introduce new features on top of the security and stability fixes that will be released with Opera 10.61.

This means that we are testing the 10.61 release, and 10.70 in parallel, which may cause some confusion if you look at build numbers. The most recent 10.61 build may have a higher build number than the latest 10.70 build, but that is simply the number assigned to them by the build system. Opera “10.70″ is still the main development branch, while 10.61 is only intended to be a smaller security/bug fix release.

Early adopters can download the second release candidate of Opera 10.61 from the Opera Desktop Team blog. Opera 10.70 is also available for download, and introduces several new features:

This one contains mostly Presto (Core) changes, and there are even a few new features:

HTML5 HashChangeEvent
CSS3 image-fit and image-position
Selection.selectAllChildren

There are also a few optimizations for SVG, improvements to the JavaScript debugger, and we have added the option opera:config#VisitedLink|VisitedLinksState to control :visited (0 – disable :visited, 1 – match same domain only, 2 – enable :visited normally).

There you got it. Opera 10.61 will be released soon, Opera 10.70 in the near future.

Opera users can expect improvements in all areas but most noticeably in browser performance and web standard support.

The final version of Opera 10.60 continues to shine in web browser benchmarks like Peacekeeper often surpassing other fast web browsers like Google Chrome.

opera1060 speed

Opera 10.60 is one of the fastest web browsers available. This is confirmed by benchmarks but also by the subjective impression of page loading times in the browser.

opera1060

The browser scores 100 of 100 in the Acid 3 test and has added several HTML5 features and elements to its arsenal.

Opera 10.60 now supports for instance HTML5 video (WebM), offline web applications, geolocation and web workers. Take a look at Opera 10.60 Beta Released, Fastest Browser Gets Even Faster for an in depth review of Opera 10.60.

opera html5 video

It is now possible to join the Youtube HTML5 beta to view videos on the popular video hosting site without Adobe Flash installed.

Interface elements have been improved slightly, the menu button has been changed to make its functionality clearer to the user. Several icons have been changed or added as well but the design of the browser is overall pretty similar to that of the Opera 10.50 branch.

Search suggestions have been added for selected providers, improving the search experience of Opera users. Google Search is still the default search provider in Opera but Bing has been added to the list of available providers to offer users additional choices.

Opera 10.60 is already available for download at the official Opera website. It is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh systems. The internal update checker has not picked up the new version yet.

Opera performs very well in popular web browser benchmarks, how well usually depends on the benchmark. It is fair to say that Opera 10.60 will rank fairly high in all of them except those that benefit from hardware acceleration.

The developers have released a series of snapshot releases and a beta release before the release candidate was released.

opera 10.60

These snapshot releases included lots of stability and performance improvements but also added support for several HTML5 web technologies like HTML5 Video, Geolocation, Offline Web Applications, Cross-Document Messaging or Web Workers.

The release candidate actually continued the stability work by fixing several crash issues. Opera 10.60 RC1 has been released for Microsoft Windows, Macintosh and Linux systems.

The developers are still looking for major new issues that they have overlooked so far. It is likely that these major issues would then be fixed in upcoming release candidates.

Check out the blog posting over at the Opera Desktop Team blog for additional information and download links.

The developers have not released a changelog of the new version but have mentioned the changes in Opera 10.50 alpha in a blog post over at the Opera Desktop Team blog.

Well we have upgraded our core rending engine slightly, done a little work on video support, improved certain aspects of performance, improved Windows 7 integration, fixed some mail issues and added support for IMAP COMPRESS, added ‘inspect element’ to the right click menu and finally of course, fixed a number of common crashes!

This new release is only available for the Windows operating system and users of previous Opera versions should note that this new build uses a new bookmarking file for storing bookmarks which does not seem to convert the old bookmarks at this point. The only option is to import the old bookmarks by going to Manage bookmarks – File – Import Opera bookmarks and browse for the old bookmarks.adr file in the Opera profile.

Some commenters of the release announcement post have mentioned new bugs that include crashes and stability issues. Opera 10.50 alpha will for instance crash when the user tries to copy an url in the web browser using the right-click menu.

Opera 10.50 alpha can be downloaded from the Opera website where it is currently only available in English for Windows.

The Unix version of Opera 10.50 has undergone some changes as well, most notable the removed dependency on the QT libraries which caused a problem for users who wanted to install the browser but did not have the libraries installed.

This and following versions of Opera do not require the libraries but will make use of them if they are installed on the computer system.

This means that you can run Opera without any graphical toolkit installed if you want to (plain X11), but if you do have toolkits installed, Opera will try to load and use them to integrate into the environment. Currently we are focusing on getting support for Gnome/GTK+ and KDE4/Qt4 into 10.5. The work on KDE4 integration is not at a stage yet where we think it can be used, so this pre-alpha release only has support for GTK

The desktop team recommends to install the Opera 10.50 pre-alpha release in a separate directory to avoid compatibility issues and to have a fallback version if Opera 10.50 does not run stable on the computer system.

Existing Opera users can alternatively use the Check For Updates option in the Help menu to download Opera 9.63. The only other changes are one addition to the opera:config menu which can be set to close tabs by double-clicking on them. There are also four additions to the mail, news and chat functions of Opera.

List of security changes and improvements:

• Manipulating text input contents can allow execution of arbitrary code
• HTML parsing flaw can cause Opera to execute arbitrary code
• Long hostnames in file: URLs can cause execution of arbitrary code
• Script injection in feed preview can reveal contents of unrelated news feeds
• Built-in XSLT templates can allow cross-site scripting
• Fixed an issue that could reveal random data
• SVG images embedded using tags can no longer execute Java or plugin content
• Opera now imports .p12 private certificates

The changelog lists some general items like “lots of stability fixes” and “Several fixes to saving of images”. Other changes include site specific fixes for flickr, Fixed functionality on the new Flickr Organizer, and last.fm, Fixed crash with last.fm. For a complete list of changes take a look at the changelog on the release website.

The official homepage still lists version 9.01 for download but this will change soon I suppose. I hope they post a detailed changelog soon on the main homepage with more information about those general fixes. Opera is running very stable and I’am really wondering what they mean with stability fixes.

There have been numerous stability and bug fixes as well as additions to the browser itself. It´s free, why don´t you get it.