Opera 12.13 final has been released
The last month was a quite one in terms of news from Opera Software. The company released Opera 12.12 on December 17 and turned silent afterwards until it released a first snapshot of the upcoming Opera 12.13 exactly a month later.
Today, Opera 12.13 final has been released by Opera Software, an update to the stable version of the browser that the company classifies as a security and stability update.
Existing Opera users can check for the update with a click on Opera > Help > Check for updates. The new version of the Internet browser is already picked up the update checker so that it can be installed right from within the browser.
New users find the latest version on the Opera website where it can be downloaded for all supported operating systems.
As far as updates go, the changelog lists the following security fixes in the new version of Opera:
- Fixed an issue where DOM events manipulation might be used to execute arbitrary code.
- Fixed an issue where use of SVG clipPaths could allow execution of arbitrary code.
- Fixed a low severity security issue.
- Fixed an issue where CORS requests could omit the preflight request.
Several stability improvements have been made to the version as well:
- Fixed an issue on Facebook where Opera got internal communication errors on the site.
- Fixed that no websites were loaded on start up if Opera was disconnected from the Internet
- Fixed an issue on deviantart.com and other sites that use the HTML5 history API. On those sites, images would not load anymore if the back navigation was used.
Opera Software in addition has integrated a new stand-alone update checker on Linux and Windows that is part of an upgrade to the software's auto-update system. The new program seems to have been added to the updatechecker directory of the Opera installation.
Windows users benefit from a new search hijacking protection that Opera included in the new version of the browser. This is however only effective if the default search engine is used in the browser.
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Numerous users reporting an unusual volume of crashes after 12.13 update along with a variety of peculiar work-arounds. While I haven’t had any crashes yet I just posted about very high memory usage since updating. I also disabled auto-updates (Opera and widgets) as a precaution after numerous reports linking this to crashes.
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=1613752&abc=&page=1&skip=0&show=&perscreen=50
I used Opera as my secondary browser, with Firefox being primary. But after the update to 12.12, somehow Opera managed to erase all my bookmarks (fortunately I make regular backups, so it wasn’t a real loss). This was the last drop after endless attempts to contact them regarding some bugs in the cookie management engine. Right now I am using only Firefox – I tried Chrome, but I didn’t like it that much; Opera was extremely configurable compared to it… So the search goes on :)
I think those that knew and loved Opera for everything that was good about it has abandonded it. Each new version the last year has become slower and more prone to display ..Opera – not responding.. for extended periods of time.
Anyone know a good alternative to Opera?
Nothing as configurable as Opera. I’m seriously thinking of making my own configurable browser with webkit wrapped with Qt myself.