Opera launches Opera 11 beta

Gets support for extensions

OPERA MIGHT NOT be the most popular desktop web browser out there, but the company is doing well in the mobile market and continues to push out new features for its desktop browser. The company has announced a beta version of Opera 11 which is available for download from today and it brings with it a fair few new features, but the most significant one is support for extensions based on the W3C widget specification.

Opera 11 supports extensions based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript as well as some additional APIs and the company has put together some tutorials to help developers make their own extensions for the web browser. On top of that, Opera already offers a selection of extensions that can be downloaded today once you’ve installed the new beta. Currently it’s a fairly small selection of a mere 26 extensions, but hopefully this should grow over time. Some of the more useful ones includes a translation add-on, a QR-code generator, a WYSIWYG page editor, an Opera to Phone plug-in that allows you to push just about anything from Opera to your Android phone and a configuration tool for Opera.

Other new features include a new JavaScript engine which is set to once again boost the browser performance and if you head over to Future Marks’ Peacekeeper browser benchmark you’ll see that Opera 11 beta has a significant lead ahead of all other browsers in terms of performance. Opera has also added an option that prevents plug-ins from loading unless you click on them to load which could come in handy, especially on a slow internet connection, or if you’re on a mobile connection with a small data allowance. Opera has also added much improved HTML5 support with support for server-sent events and websockets.S|A

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