New Features and Important Notes

Out-of-Process Plug-ins

Opera now runs plug-ins as a separate process, allowing for more control when a plug-in misbehaves. This feature will enhance security and stability.

• For more information about why out-of-process plug-ins are important please see our article describing the feature.

64-Bit Mac and Windows Versions

The 64-bit version of Opera will offer performance improvements for some functions and allow Opera more freedom in allocating memory.

Themes

New, lightweight themes make it easier to customize the browser. Install or change themes at the click of a button, without restarting the browser.

• The themes gallery can be viewed here, and for more information on how to design themes please seeour article describing the new theme system.

Address Field Enhancements

Numerous improvements to the address bar have been made:

• Improved address field and address bar drop-down suggestions
• Smart URL shortening in the address field drop-down
• The page title and the page excerpt will be used for full page search results
• URL and page content columns in the address field drop-down have been combined

Experimental Full Hardware Acceleration

Hardware acceleration allows Opera to offload graphics rendering from the processor (CPU) to the graphics card (GPU), making graphics intensive operations such as animations faster.

• This feature is disabled by default. To enable it you may set EnableHardwareAcceleration to 1. WebGL (which takes advantage of Hardware Acceleration) can be enabled by setting EnableWebGL to 1.
• To find out more about creating webpages with WebGL, please see our developer article.

Right-to-Left (RTL) Script Support Added, Language Support Expanded

RTL support will bring additional stability for certain languages. Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, and Arabic languages added.

Window and Tabs API

Extensions will now be able to interact with tabs, create tab groups, and manage windows.

• See the Windows and Tabs API for more information.

Opera Unite, Opera Widgets, and Opera Voice Discontinuation

Opera Unite and Opera Widgets will be off by default in Opera 12.00, and will eventually be phased out of the Opera browser in the future. Voice support will be removed as of Opera 12.00, as the voice-detection library is no longer supported by the third-party vendor.

• To find out more, please see our announcement.
• Developers are encouraged to move their solutions to the extensions platform, for information on converting a Widget to an extension, please see this article.

Web Specifications Support

Opera 12.00 will include changes in the Opera Presto 2.10 engine up to core-integration-point 289.

WebRTC

Initial support for real-time communication has been added. Allowing the source of HTML5 <video> to be set to the user's webcam.

• See our web specifications support on this item for more information

HTML5 Drag and Drop

Drag and drop enables webpages to have elements that the user can drag from one page to another, or from their desktop to the webpage.

• See our web specifications support on this item for more information
• For a guide to implementing drag and drop, please see our article.

CSS3 Animations and Transitions

Support for animations and transitions has been updated and expanded.

• See our web specifications support on this item for more information
• Also see our article on implementing CSS animations: Making a move with CSS animations

Do Not Track

Added support for the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header.

• See our article about implementing DNT for more information.

Paged Overflow

An innovative new set of CSS constructs that allow webpages to be split up into paged media, revolutionizing the Web reading experience.

• See our web specifications support on this item for more information

Cross-OriginResourceSharing (CORS) for XMLHttpRequest

CORS enables more secure and flexible communications between websites.

• See our web specifications support on this item for more information

Improvements since Opera 12.00 beta

General and User Interface

• A custom user agent preference has been added to opera:config

Display and Scripting

• Improved pipelining, JavaScript, and Turbo

Fixes and Changes since Opera 12.00 beta

For a complete list of bug fixes for this version, please see the full bug fixes list.

Security

• Fixed an issue where hidden keyboard navigation could allow cross site scripting or code execution, as reported by Jordi Chancel; see our advisory
• Fixed an issue where a combination of clicks and key presses could lead to cross site scripting or code execution, as reported by Jordi Chancel; see our advisory
• Fixed an issue where cross-domain JSON resources may be exposed as JavaScript variable data; seeour advisory
• Fixed an issue where carefully timed reloads, redirects, and navigation could spoof the address field, as reported by Jordi Chancel; see our advisory
• Fixed an issue where pages could prevent navigation to a target page, spoofing the address field, as reported by Code Audit Labs of vulnhunt.com; see our advisory