Opera Software has posted a new beta of their upcoming Opera 12 browser that adds a number of new features and brings support for upcoming standards.
One of the major new architectural changes coming to Opera with the next release is support for OOPP, and consequently support for native 64-bit builds on Windows. By now all major browsers support either a multi-process model, OOPP, or both to ensure browsing stability.
If you aren’t aware of what OOPP is, it stands for Out of Process Plugins, and is a technique adopted by some browsers to protect the browser from crashing when a plug-in crashes. If OOPP is supported, plug-ins run in a separate process, thus isolating the browser from the plug-in.
The lack of availability and popularity of 64-bit plug-ins held back the availability of 64-bit browsers till now since the plug-in and the browser both need to both be 64-bit or 32-bit. This is of course coupled with the fact that 64-bit browsers offer little advantage over their 32-bit counterparts as of yet, and 32-bit browsers run perfectly fine on 64-bit Windows.
However with the plug-in running in a separate process Opera developers have removed the requirement of both the browser and plug-in being 64-bit. Opera 12 can run the 32-bit Flash player even in its 64-bit build. Of course, by now Flash Player is already available in a 64-bit version, so there isn’t too much advantage to this development.
Architectural changes aside, Opera 12 supports new web standard features such as HTML5 drag and drop. This allows dragging and dropping content in a browser between pages, and support dragging dropping files from the desktop to the browser. The mechanism is supported by a number of websites for uploading files. GMail for example allows dragging dropping files to the compose window to attach them to a message, and WordPress supports uploading media files via drag and drop.
Other changes in standard support also come for web video, EcmaScript, and a host of other small updates and fixes to standards support.
This Opera 12 build also brings updates to CSS3 support, particularly in the transitions and animations area. CSS Transitions allow basic animations between changes of state; for example by setting a transition property on an element’s hover state, you can have the element animate smoothly between its standard and mouse-over states, rather than have a jerky change. CSS Animations are more powerful and add support for generic animation definations that change CSS properties of an element over time, with support for keyframes. With these features there is no need for JavaScript for basic animations and transitions.
You can find out more about this build and download it from here