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Opera 11.50 Released 129

Posted by Unknown Lamer
from the opera-50.11-to-be-released-next-week dept.
An anonymous reader writes "With a shiny new version of Presto that's apparently up to 20% faster, cool tweaks to Speed Dial, and a bunch of other features and bug fixes, the crazy Norwegians have just launched the latest version of desktop Opera."

Opera 11.50 Released

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  • Gray (Score:5, Funny)

    by Mystra_x64 (1108487) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @03:21PM (#36602534)

    20% faster, 20% cooler, and 30% more gray than before.

    • by lennier1 (264730)

      Sooner or later they'll find a way to eliminate the last bits of color as well.

    • by djh2400 (1362925)
      I've wanted to use Opera for a while, but my main issue with it over the years has been how it blatantly ignores OS themes and comes charging in with its own crazy color schemes in stark contrast to everything else. I take it this hasn't been fixed, yet? It should have some sort of option to tick like Chrom[e|ium] to use the current desktop theme as best it can.

      (The last time I posted something like this someone modded me a troll... Please don't mod me a troll; I'm just a guy who likes visual uniformi
      • Re:Gray (Score:4, Informative)

        by Mystra_x64 (1108487) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:01PM (#36603272)

        Well, there is a "system color scheme" (or similar; in dropdown) in that Shift+F12 dialog, but how that'll work for I don't know. I certainly do not have so many gray color text in my theme, but it is present in Opera.

      • by dreemernj (859414)
        The native skin is what you are probably looking for. Every version of Opera that has had skins has had the option for a native skin. Right click a UI element, choose Customize, then Appearance, and click the Skins tab. In Windows at least it makes it look like a generic/standard Windows program.
  • I was hoping that this would bring WebGL to the mainline Opera. The shipping Safari should be WebGL enabled soon and Chrome and Firefox are already here.
  • International pizza delivery is fun http://www.reddit.com/r/Random_Acts_Of_Pizza/comments/ib61w/offer_hello_internet_we_launched_a_new_opera/ [reddit.com]

    I downloaded it shortly after the download count exceeded the crew of the Death Star. As of right now, they're well past Rebecca Black dislikes

    • by Bronster (13157)

      We also had free icecreams for all staff in the canteen :) "be the first to taste the new browser, and taste some icecream too!"

      Even for those of us who don't actually work on the browser product itself (I do backend stuff for mail.opera.com)

      • A salute to the entire Opera team :) Now bonus points if you can make Opera mini/mobile available for the Nook Color without having to root the device.

  • Seems like the most important part was excluded - the download counter! http://www.opera.com/ [opera.com]

    Currently, more people have downloaded Opera 11.50 than have disliked Rebecca Black!
  • by kyrio (1091003) <{moc.eromkrul} {ta} {todhsals}> on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @03:35PM (#36602798) Homepage
    Lots of bugs left in it. I'm still using it, because it is insanely fast, but I hope they release the next version in a week.
    • by Threni (635302)

      I've played with most of the new browsers, especially all the Chrome and Firefox releases, and I've not noticed any speed increase whatsoever in any of them, from my humble laptop to my quad core 64 bit desktop. I'm not denying that they're faster, just that they were already fast enough for the stuff I do. A bit like when graphics card manufacturers were optimising 2d drivers to no end.

      Still, a faster Opera - that's going to make one or two people happy.

    • Insanely fast? I have Zimbra Webmail open in a tab (the only open tab at the moment), and it's almost unresponsive it's so slow. I'm waiting upwards of 10 seconds between clicking on an unread email and it opening in the preview pane below.

      I also have the same interface open in Chrome. It's instantaneous.

      Yeah, so, as usual I've uninstalled Opera, having been promised more than was delivered.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Did they fix the random freezing? No matter what computer I installed Opera on it would always freeze at random times. The interface wouldn't accepted input, it would just still there and then suddenly come back to life a minute later.

    • If it helps to know, I've used it for years on numerous machines and never seen this behavior.

      I'm not saying this to you to deny that it's happening, but rather so you have an extra information point to investigate the problem. I had a problem once with a machine locking up from time to time with a particular bit of software I was using and it turned out to be a problem with the network I was on.

      • I too have been using Opera for years on various OS's and machines. I've recently noticed the problem using Opera in Ubuntu since 10.10. I dont use my Windows7 partition enough to notice if it affects that OS as well, nor my Android phone. It used to only happen when I visited NHL.com, but lately it just kind of happens all over. Not frequently enough to really piss me off, just like maybe once every few days for 10-20 secs at a time.

        I also encounter a weird bug where text input wont work unless I give focu

  • Now that Tetzchner left, who is going to swim to Norway at for 1 millionth download?

  • Op-what, now? Is that some sort of web browser or something?
    • by MobileTatsu-NJG (946591) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:10PM (#36603388)


      It's a browser with the features FireFox will have in a year or so.

      • by Kjella (173770)

        I guess you didn't get the memo, Firefox is copying a different browser now. Opera is a browser that survived despite being first payware then adware while IE and Mozilla was giving it away, it was that good. Sadly they went freeware too late and never caught the wave as Firefox broke the IE monopoly, otherwise they could have been where Chrome is today. The last releases haven't been all that, sure it's still a great browser but it doesn't really pack anything unique anymore. Between Microsoft, Mozilla, Go


          Uh, yeah, I use both Opera and Chrome and .. no, that is not true. Chrome's UI has a lot of catching up to do.

        • by pbhj (607776)

          >sure it's still a great browser but it doesn't really pack anything unique anymore

          Opera Unite?? What other browser has a web server in it?

      • by Idbar (1034346)



        And the popularity Firefox had in 2004.

      • ....often done with more thought and better execution.

  • by rueger (210566) * on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:02PM (#36603276) Homepage
    I don't know how many times I have installed and abandoned Opera. I really, really want to like it!

    This time it downloaded and installed easily on my Ubuntu box, but when launched it declared that Flash was not installed on my system.

    Of course, it is.

    Still, clicked through the Adobe website, clicked the "Download" Flash link, and... well, nothing. It just sat there.

    Yet again, Chrome wins.

    (Tho' I do love Opera on my Android phone)
    • by Mystra_x64 (1108487) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:07PM (#36603350)

      Which pretty much means it does not know where exactly Flash is installed. There is an option in, duh, options to set that.

      • by rueger (210566) *
        Never had to set no option for Chrome. Or Firefox.
        • by fafaforza (248976)

          So you'll damn the browser because you're too lazy to do 3 minutes' worth of googling. Aren't most things a PITA on Linux? I'm surprised you even chose it as a desktop if you don't want to deal with minor annoyances like that.

          • Aren't most things a PITA on Linux?

            Chrome and firefox figure it out, I think its fair to take some marks off when such a huge bit of polish is missing.

          • by owlstead (636356)

            Yeah, but especially with flash it could become multiple days of googling fast. I'm sorry, but things like that just need to work. On my system, with Opera, if I want to safe a picture the "save as..." dialog box is modal but does not get focus. That kind of stuff irritates the hell out of me. I googled that, but no dice.

            But then, we are still living in a world (soon to be deprecated) where a browser - any browser - cannot always find the right application, and asks the user to suppy the binary file, starti

          • by drinkypoo (153816)

            Aren't most things a PITA on Linux?

            No. Most things are very easy. Often they are easier than on OSX or Windows. Modifying a human-readable flat file is easier than modifying a plist or the registry and when using OSX or Windows I regularly have to do these things, respectively.

      • Not that its the end of the world, but that seems like the kind of thing that falls under the category of "essential polish". Ubuntu isnt exactly some obscure form of linux, either.

    • by dreemernj (859414)
      Strange. I installed it on Ubuntu 11.04 and everything just worked. I guess mileage can always vary.
    • by Joe Tie. (567096)

      Opera mini really is fantastic. I know it's a bit hacky in how it works, but I don't care. It's a hack that works. I have a amazingly cheap old android tablet, and browsers are among the heaviest things on it. All except opera, which just flies.

  • by dejanc (1528235) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @04:16PM (#36603496)

    I'm using Debian Squeeze which comes with Firefox 3.5 as default. I was happy with this browser, but I wanted latest and greatest so I upgraded first to 3.6 and then to 4. As much as I liked it, it was very slow - I'm not talking about academic javascript benchmark results, but stuff like opening heavy pages like GMail, or tab animations, various UI stuff, etc. None of it was deal breaking, but hey, after spending as much money on hardware as I have, I really expect things to fly. Instead, I had significant UI lags.

    So, I tried Opera. It took some getting used to and it misses some options that I depended on on Iceweasel (namely, being able to not allow sites to define their own fonts), but I mostly found workarounds, and I must say I'm very happy with it.

    Opera is much snappier than Firefox and Opera's QT integrates well into my XFCE environment with GTK+ gui style. I don't know what is the problem with firefox - bad 3d drivers (nvidia) or something else, but at this day and age, I really shouldn't have to suffer from slow UI.

    I am still to try to replace Thunderbird with Opera's email, and I am looking forward to testing it.

    • namely, being able to not allow sites to define their own fonts

      You probably want "Preferences / Advanced / Content / Style options... / Presentation modes / Author mode / My fonts and colors" option.

    • by synapse7 (1075571)
      I run Opera in Fedora 15 and Mint(various versions) on netbooks and old PCs and it seems to usually have better flash performance than Firefox 3 or 4. For general browsing and news reading Opera is my favorite browser.
    • I do like opera's email (aka M2), but I still have thunderbird installed, mostly because Opera has never included S/MIME or GPG/PGP support. Nor smart card authentication, for that matter. I've been using Opera since version 3, and even paid for versions back when that was their model. I just wish they'd let me digitally sign emails and login to websites with my smart card.
  • How about a /. poll about the reasons for why Opera keeps having a very low user percentage after 15 years or development? Firefox and Chrome came from nowhere and succeeded, Opera has a small loyal user base and doesn't get any more than that. What I can remember about all those years of using Opera as a browser for compatibility tests is a lot of little details done in very peculiar and non standard ways that made the browser a little annoying to use. I've got a feeling that most of those issues have been

    • by Obfuscant (592200)

      Firefox and Chrome came from nowhere and succeeded,

      Firefox came from Mozilla which came from Netscape which came from "NOT MICROSOFT!". That created a lot of early support.

      Chrome came from Google and seems to be one of those things that Google likes to sneak in during installs of something else that you really do want. You know, that small print with the pre-checked approval to "also install X?" during the installation process for something else.

      • Plus Chrome did some real hardcore advertising, like giant posters in Paris subway and probably lots of other things I'm not aware of. I don't think any other browser ever did anything similar, or even any other piece of software as far as I know. The Google guys definitely have some capacity at moving the lines.

        That and Slashdot mentioning Firefox/Mozilla as often as it mentions Apple today.

    • It helps that Chrome has a lot of advertisements, and is featured on a site visited by a billion people a month. Firefox came out before Opera was free, so it was a much better choice at the time.
      • Also Opera did break a lot on a lot of sites and apps, so it was almost unusable for quite a while; to the very least it was out of the question to advise it to coworkers who were still using IE6, you had to push them to FF because with Opera they would come back to you after five minutes asking "why doesn't it work?" The Opera team used to hate to be reminded of that fact and they did vehemently defend their software, arguing that it was all the fault of developers testing against IE6 and FF and calling it

        • by gsnedders (928327) on Tuesday June 28, 2011 @06:11PM (#36604990) Homepage

          To speak as an Opera employee (albeit only for the past couple of years â" two years tomorrow, actually) for once:

          While certainly some people in the company vehemently defended it, as you put it, the number of people internally who'd say that it wasn't a problem for us to fix were in a minuscule minority. Certainly, from around a decade ago, we've ended up with more non-standard IE extensions implemented than FF have, which led some sites to work better in Opera than FF, though on others (to this day) sends us down the wrong code-path due to broken browser-sniffing.

          I'm not really convinced it was the market that pushed site-compat to get to where it was today: it was more the gradual effort over a number of years towards it, and in general on the web you're either fairly badly broken (as Opera was) or stuff pretty much works (as all major browsers are like now).

          To be fair, there have also been cultural changes within the company. For example, we have over three times the number of automated tests today than we had when I started, which has massively reduced the number of regressions, thus allowing developer time to be spent more on fixing bugs once.

          Note that with 10.50 we introduced an entirely new JS engine, which worked with pretty much the same amount of the web as the one in 10.10. That's what I've spent the majority of my last couple of years working on, and the fact we shipped it working just as well as the previous engine, having developed it in less than half the time that it took V8 to reach beta, is a testament to our testing nowadays.

          We don't have the thousands of users of every nightly FF and Chrome have â" we very much have to get it right first time, and that presents a far harder challenge, yet now, we are succeeding. Hurrah!

          One final note on Google Apps: they don't officially support us, quite often doing stuff using non-standard stuff (often with one codepath for IE, using non-standard stuff; one codepath for FF, using different non-standard stuff; and yet another codepath for WebKit, using yet again different non-standard stuff), making it hard for us to know what to do. (Do we try and copy the non-standard FF/WebKit stuff? They're trying to get rid of a lot of their non-standard stuffâ¦) Hopefully, sometime soon, this will change, and we'll be officially supported.

    • For the early part of Opera's life it was free if you wanted it to display adds, or you had to pay for it. They did finally make it free, but it was too little too late. Mozilla had already gotten the Not Microsoft market. Apple with the iPod halo released Safari based from WebKit which made WebKit possible allowing Google Chrome to come in. With Apple and Googles Advertising budget they got the WebKit browsers into place, and Firefox became popular because IE started to really stink as IE 6 was becom

    • by fafaforza (248976)

      Firefox didn't come from nowhere. How many years have we had topics on /. about it passing IE in market share.

      It is Chrome that came out of nowhere, but I'd bet that the adoption rate -- as compared to Opera -- has a lot to do with Google's reach into most parts of everyone's every day usage (gmail, calendars, etc, etc). Feature wise, it's probably on par with Opera, but I don't use Chrome to say anything insightful about a direct comparison.

  • Look. See? This is how you do it.

  • I like them a lot, and I've been using them for ages. but with that new numbering scheme, it looks like FFox should overtake them in no time, and then I'll just have to switch ?

    Plus, Opera are clearly pussies: .39 upgrades ? really ?

  • Seems like Opera ignores the anti-aliasing settings. I've switched anti aliasing off in both environments, but opera blurs ahead anyway.

    • by synapse7 (1075571)
      I just installed 11.50 and also noticed this. The previous version did not seem to have this issue. I will continue to use it for general browsing / news reading, I tried a few different firefox speeddial addons and could not find one that I liked.
    • Turn off automatic zoom.
  • And yet, it still can't render CSS3 colors [globeprgroup.com] correctly. What's the problem here? Wasn't Opera at the forefront of web standards compliance at one point?
    • by rrossman2 (844318)

      So is that a test page using the actual CSS code? Or a static page just showing what it looks like in Opera? If it's the first option, then Chrome doesn't do it right either per that page (but I know Opera, Chrome, Safari, Firefox work on opacity with RGBA just fine on DIV's)

  • Why Opera? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Because it can scroll through a whole page of slashdot comments smoothly. On any zoom setting. Under both linux and windows. But no worries, Firefox fans, you'll get equal performance by FF34872e12.

  • Too bad hardware acceleration didn't make the cut yet. It was available in a test build though. I'm looking forward to their implementation of hardware acceleration - it uses OpenGL instead of Direct2D on Windows. I've had all kind of problems with Direct2D (namely, it doesn't seem to accelerate much of anything - not even supposedly basic stuff like scrolling).
    • by Glonk (103787)

      You're going to be in for a rude surprise.

      OpenGL drivers on Windows are awful, DirectX is where all of the development effort goes on driver teams. At work we wrote our app using OpenGL for a 3D overlay because we ship on Windows, Mac, and Linux, but on Windows we took the time to write a DirectX backend instead of OpenGL and the stability and performance shot up noticably. OpenGL is a forgotten "checkbox feature" on Windows today, not much more.

  • ... when they are open source.

    Been using opera for good 5 years, but realized, even though it's tab & download management is much superior to other browsers, chrome (and/or firefox) are just easier to get on with, because they are essentially open. If competition can be open, why can't we?
    • You're already posting at +2, why are you karma whoring now?

    • by XahXhaX (730306)

      That's a trivial non-point. I'm sure it's a devious statement to make on Slashdot, but open software does not necessarily mean _better_ software. See Windows vs Linux, iPhone vs Android, Nintendo DS or PSP vs one of those Chinese handhelds, and of course Opera vs Firefox.

      Opening Opera would gain absolutely nothing beyond appealing to OSS zealots, especially now that they've stolen/adopted Firefox's plugins model.

  • Is the javascript whitelisting comparable to NoScript yet in terms of effectiveness and ease of use? Is there an equivalent to AdBlock Plus and Scrapbook? If a non-firefox browser would incorporate those features as standard and do it well, I would be happy to give them a try. Especially with Firefox's idiotic rapid release numbering scheme I am ready to try some alternatives.

  • Set a wallpaper with Opera in Windows go to your pictures folder and observed unstandard bmp files that do not show up right with Windows Picture Viewier. Never fixed forever...
  • As of now, Firefox has become so bloated that the only way I can rationalize why I bother with it is because of the robust addon support. That's it. I can no long say it's fast nor easy to use. I've been using Opera on and off, but in the end, I realize I can't survive the internet without AdBlock, Tamper Data, and Firebug, forcing me to come crawling back to the Fox.
  • Their GUI still looks horrible in OS X. Like a home made app by someone who never heard about the native UI. Besides that there is no real reason to use it. But still I try it every time, just for the fond memories I have of it. Back when Netscape 4 was horrible and Opera 3 ruled them all. And was worth to be payed ... yes, worth it.

  • I'm currently using Opera 16, testing the new Time Travel function. It really works its wonders, I wonder if Chrome will implement this too in version 287. --Sent from my iBrainimplant

Remember, UNIX spelled backwards is XINU. -- Mt.