Opera 11.10 RC4 Beta alias Barracuda : review

Opera is always innovative and comprehensive browser which stands out as a reference. Its speed, its many features, interface and now the arrival of extensions and highlighting its strengths could make him win market share with the public. To discover them, you will not regret it!

“Barracuda” is also the code name of the upcoming 11.10 version of the Opera browser. This is the first of a series of Opera versions where each one will have an associated code name.

– Haavard

Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Maemo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, and iOS operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices. Approximately 120 million mobile phones have been shipped with Opera. Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems. Some television set-top boxes use Opera. Adobe Systems has licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite.

The free Opera browser and platform is still required as a reference in a highly competitive field. As teams of Google Chrome , Mozilla Firefox , Internet Explorer and Safari, the Norwegian Opera Software focuses on the integration of web standards, optimizing the loading of pages, customize the browser and of course modernization of the interface more simple and ergonomic.  Noteworty to mention HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, chief technical officer of the Opera Software company is also the co-creator of the CSS web standard.

However, Opera is still characterized by the integration of many ideas and innovations such as the ‘Turbo’ to compress pages to speed up their display on the small connections and make savings on 3G packages, “Opera Unite “offering the possibility of transforming the browser server to share multimedia content or hosting a forum. It is also a manager of e-mails, customer BitTorrent , the management of HTML 5 video tag and SVG filter modules of content and changing the style CSS and many personalization features like complete themes, widgets and Now extensions.

What is new in Opera Barracuda

This new version introduces support long-awaited extensions developed in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari, the Norwegian browser will finally have an official library and an integrated real extension manager. Based on the W3C specifications, these extensions can be quickly ported to, but also imported from Google Chrome and Safari browsers which share the same technology. They can be quickly installed, configured, uninstalled without restarting the browser and will have a graphical interface, will run in the background and can be deactivated with a click when viewing secure sites through an HTTPS connection.

On ergonomics aside, we note the arrival of an evolution in the management of the tabs. It is now possible to overlay multiple tabs by simply dragging and dropping. We may collect and separate double clicking on it, but also display fast previews of each tab, flying over this new item with the mouse cursor. The aim is obviously to facilitate the management of many native open tabs, but also saves space on the screen. The manager of integrated mail advantage of some improvements. In addition to correcting bugs in the traditional past, the client startup is faster and scroll bars have been redesigned. Managing saved queries and filters are now combined in a section called “Labels”. Fields of research has been simplified and in turn will create a sort rule from a simple query. Finally, we note a support still further web standards, optimizing the JavaScript engine as well as the prominence of mouse shortcuts.

Webmasters: Providing tailored content in your Speed Dial entry

There are a few new ways to provide tailored content and styling to Speed Dial entries for your own website: view-mode:minimized in CSS, the X-Purpose HTTP header, and autoreloading. You will get the needed source code from Opera team here.

Using Apache mod_rewrite to redirect all Speed Dial requests for any URL for your website

You can create a  custom preview html document and use apache’s mod_rewrite to provide unique and custom speed dial entry. The needed code is:

RewriteEngine OnRewriteCond %{HTTP:X-Purpose} ^preview$RewriteRule ^(.*) /preview.html