Opera 11 released

by Tom Dwyer

After a mere two days of release candidates, Opera Software has released their Opera 11 desktop browser complete with extensions and their newest innovation, tab stacking.

Opera is known for having a fast development cycle and with Opera 11 the company was keeping up both the development speed and browser speed. The beta was released less than a month ago, 23 November to be precise and in that time we saw nine releases up to the final version.

Opera 11 has seen its fair share of hype over the past month, but why? Well it turns out there have been a huge number of improvements over its predecessor with additions such as; Extensions, Tab stacking, Safer address fields and new Visual mouse gestures. Additionally the old favourites remain; Opera Link, Opera Turbo and Opera Sync.

It seems they’ve also followed in Google Chromes footsteps and added auto suggest to the address bar and search.

The new installer has also undergone a significant change. When it is run, it unpacks everything in a temporary folder and starts up Opera in installer mode, meaning the installation process takes seconds.

On top of all that and more, it seems Opera 11 has had a reasonable speed increase while on some PC’s, Peacekeeper gives the winner to Chrome, Opera 11 seems to be battling for the speed crown.

With extensions being the reason for many to not use the browser, will Opera see a change in market share? Time will tell if their work really did pay off.

You can click here to learn more or choose to download now.

Source: Neowin.net

Good article on it here:

http://lifehacker.com/5714086/opera-11-debuts-with-extensions-tab-stacking-gestures-and-more

I upgraded for the sole reason that Opera finally supports (useful!) extensions. I can now download YouTube videos at high resolution (.MP4 format for synching with my iPhone) from within the browser with a single click.