Download Opera 12.10 Beta Candidate
Well, here is an unexpected move. If you were hoping to see 12.50 Final later this year, prepare to see a new branch first. Why? It looks like the Norwegian browser maker has renamed its internal version of the Opera 12.50 web browser and released it as Opera 12.10 Beta RC.
Unfortunately, unlike their previous releases, the following build is pretty much unusable. With HWA enabled, Opera 12.10 will crash when loading Facebook, the scaling is completely broken, making it annoying to zoom in/out of various web pages and images. In addition to that, WordPress “Post New” HTML section is completely broken with lots of annoyances and crashes when using “Visual” view.
As far as new features and changes go, Opera 12.10 now supports high resolution displays, offers WebM performance enhancements and dozens of bug fixes.
Check out the official post for a complete changelog.
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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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So is HWA going to be enabled by default in 12.10? Or is the purpose of this release to push HWA back again?
No. There are still a lot of issues to be dealt with. But just the inclusion of SPDY & Retina support warrant a new release, let alone the bunch of bugs that were fixed.
Chrome & Firefox release new versions with a changelog ten times smaller. The sneer is unjustified.
The part of your comment about Chrome and Firefox is a bunch of bullshit. Here’s the full changelog for Firefox 15 as an example: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/15.0/releasenotes/buglist.html
Opera doesn’t give full changelog, so the comparison is meaningless. However, for end users(not developer) Opera introduces more things. 11.50 > new featherlight theme, 11.60 > new m2 interface + updated featherlight theme, 12.00 > lightweight themes + updated program icon etc. All of these are in sight. Firefox, on the other hand, brought small polishes. They mostly changed core of Firefox.
Indeed. Compare Firefox 10 with Firefox 15, and list the changes that can be noticed by an average end-user. For Chrome, take any two versions 10 releases apart. For Opera, 1. Opera’s list will still be larger.
That is not to say that Opera is better: clearly it has a lot of catch-up to do wrt HWA, and even with site compatibility. Probably there are other areas as well, but I can’t think of one right now (no need to list them, I bow for all thee search prowess).
Sneering at Opera because it releases a new version where x or y is not improved is unjustified. I don’t see any sneering because Chrome releases yet another version with zero noticable changes. Every browser has long-standing bugs that are already open for years, even Chrome, which is only a few years old.
Your comparisons don’t make any kind of sense. Compare the time it takes for Chrome and Firefox to release a new version to the times it takes for Opera to do so, then you can start measuring the progress that they have made. Also, Opera has alot more where to catch up than just HWA and site compatibility: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-15-safari-6-web-browser,3287-16.html And these are just the internals. Also, funny that you talk about sneering, because that’s exactly what you did in your first comment.
I did? We are both writing in the same language, are we?
Danny was obviously disappointed to see an intermediate release, where a – for him – important feature was not improved. Do we both agree his post was meant to be interpreted in a negative way?
tomshardware lends for a nice read, but can hardly be viewed as a reliable benchmark. Or do you disagree with that too?
The question whether they are trying to push HWA back once again is a legitimate one and not necessarily a sneer. And while the Browser Grand Prix is somewhat flawed, I personally regard it’s results as a fairly reliable metric.
I have several legitimate questions about you too, but I can ask them in a ‘sneering’ way or in a more neutral way. I bet you won’t like the sneering way. ‘nuf said. It is a pity the problems with HWA are still not yet solved.
About BGP: a list of fancy bars may appear reliable, but both what and how they measure all re-inforce the synthetic tests where Chrome excells in. That is not to say that the tests do not point to some serious shortcomings of Opera.
There is one test however that I find a very neat addition (at least, I didn’t see that test any where else): reliability. I find it striking that Chrome or Firefox is elected as the best browser, while the test shows that Opera is ‘the clear winner’ in the realibility test, and even stays the most responsive during that test. I find that a few orders of magnitude more important than the millisecond race in other tests, yet the end-score doesn’t refect that.
(Opening 40 tabs: Opera required one reload before all pages were fully loaded; Chrome required 13/21 reloads, depending on the platform).
The reliability test is conducted by opening 40 tabs *simultaneously*, so the outcome of such an exercise is hardly relevant to the vast majority of browser usage cases. Also, I find it very odd that Opera won the award for responsiveness when it can’t even scroll properly on websites with position:fixed elements.
So, how can he be sure then that Opera’s changelogs are 10 times bigger if they are not even released? You claim that Opera introduces more things to the end users and then all you seem to be able to list are a few UI changes. Opera 11.50 and Firefox 5 were both released in June of 2011, compare how much each browser has advanced up to this day. http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/firefox-15-safari-6-web-browser,3287-16.html
As I said, Opera offers more UI improvement on each major version. This is not to say changelog of Opera is bigger and more attractive.
No, you said that ” for end users(not developer) Opera introduces more things” and then proceeded to Opera UI changes, presumably as proof of your statement. Thinking that changes to the UI are the primary thing that end users care about is ridiculous. And even the UI changes that you list are fairly small(With the exception of the M2 client) as Opera’s fundamental UI layout hasn’t radically changed probably since the release of Opera 8. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/b7/Opera_8.0.png
You can see complete changelogs for all releases here:
http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs
If those are indeed complete changelogs then it only reinforces my previous point that Chrome and Firefox do actually progress faster.
No it is not complete. It only mention major changes.
Check link “full bug fixes list” on bottom of page to view major bug fixes and to get complete list you can check Opera Desktop blog , which mentions changelog per snapshot.
Anyway, i dont think there is any use/benefit of this discussion.
If by adding up all of the changelogs from each snapshot you get the complete changelog for a final version it is still a far cry from what Chrome and Firefox manage to accomplish in the same timespan.
Funny, when looking at the same dataset I draw exact the opposite conclusion.
I literally have no idea how you could have possibly come to an opposite conclusion, I really don’t.
http://www.sitcom.co.uk/mind_language/
There, by the way, are already 2 new “beta candidate” builds released… seems like Opera did see the lack of quality ;-)
As far as I’m concerned, 12.10 was a great move, because 12.50 would be pumping the version number.
Also, 12.10 works great here, no problem on Facebook. Running DirectX HWA on Windows 8. Going smooth
I’m using build 1594 and it’s really better than what you have described, however, the css3 test indicates that a couple of features that were supported in previous version (like voice) are no longer supported, or it’s just a mistake?
I love Opera, it’s cool
Oh boy, excuse me, it’s really unstable and crashing all the time.
I hope this situation won’t be the same in the final release.
1594 is MUCH better than this one,