After intensive testing Opera 12 Beta, today Opera team has finally released the final version of Opera 12.00. It features native 64-bit support and out-of-process plug-ins, hardware acceleration, support for WebGL, support for the new Opera Reader-feature and other, not any less interesting updates! In fact, we wanted to see if everything works so smoothly and wanted you to be able to try it as well. That's why we installed it on our cross-browser testing service Browserling.

Opera 12 Version

Try Opera 12 in Browserling now!

New Features in Opera 12

Hardware acceleration

Opera has been a nice competitor regarding speed over a long period of time. Well this doesn't change now. Although still experimental, Opera 12 now supports hardware acceleration. Means to render web pages with the help of the graphics processor, instead of solely CPU, which often has limited calculative power.

New GUI changes

Opera 12 features a new theming engine, that can offer you truly simple method to change the look and feel of the browser. Themes have been previously part of Firefox and Chrome. With Opera 12 you can download a number of custom themes from Opera's add-on website. They download and install momentarily and they do not require you to reboot your browser. You can also now tweak the way the "speed dial" page looks, changing the wallpaper using custom image or adding simple applications such as "Gismeteo", which allows you to quickly view the current weather conditions for your specific location. Currently, the tiles are not animated and only act as a link to the application website. Here is a screenshot of a penguin-style speed dial:

Opera 12 Speed Dial

Camera support

Developers, Opera 12 now supports access to web camera from a variety of different sites across the web! Now you can finally integrate webcam to your website. Naturally, the user will have to allow web camera access first, an important aspect of security.

Other important new features

  • Revamped the way page security appears.
  • Sandboxed plugins - Plug-ins that crash won't bring down the entire browser.
  • Ability to enable control of your computer's hardware without a plugin (for e.g video capture with HTML5, instead of Flash)

Have fun cross-browser testing in Opera 12!