What's new in Opera 11? Video

What's new in Opera 11? Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET. And in this First Look, I'll be showing you what's new in Opera 11, sneaking in just before the end of 2010. Extensions are the big story in Opera 11, finally introducing an add-on API to Opera. It's interesting to note that Opera sees extensions as singing in harmony with their existing widgets framework; saying that the widgets are basically standalone web-based applications while extensions are for changing the user experience in browser. Another innovation in Opera 11 is tab stacking. It's a tab grouping mechanism similar in concept to Firefox's Panorama, but completely based in the tab bar. To use it, drag one tab on top of another- it's that simple. The bottom tab will disappear, and an arrow will appear to the right of the tab. Click it to reveal the stack. Drag a tab off the stack to separate it. I like Panorama's global viewpoint so you can easily see all the groups of tabs. But Opera's tab stacking feels much smoother and much more intuitive. A third big change is the introduction of on-demand plug-ins. This is a feature that has been on the periphery of user awareness for awhile. But I have a feeling it's about to go big, as it provides much more control to users over page security and page load times. It's great for people who are rightly worried about un-patched flash and Quicktime security exploits, or for people who just want sites to load faster. Go to Preferences, Advanced, then Content to toggle the feature. Opera claims that the tweak can improve performance up to 30%, and that the browser's performance in general has been improved. Opera says that Opera 11 is 15-20% faster than Opera 10.63 on Linux, and that the browser size on disc has been reduced by almost 1/3. Another change comes to the security badge system, which marks sites as verified safe. Click on the gray web globe icon to the left of the URL bar to check a site's status. Getting information returned to us quick on some sites, and still a little bit slower to stalled for others. The badges are colored yellow for secure, green for trusted and blue for when you're running Opera's Turbo Mode- which is designed for assisting people surfing on slower connections. There have been some smaller tweaks to the browser, too. Pinning a tab will now jump it to the left of the tab bar, as is done in other browsers. The Personal bar has been replaced, too, by a Bookmarks bar, both pulling the browser into parity with the competition, and making Bookmarks more accessible with one click. Opera 11 is available from download.com. And it's definitely keeping time with the strong competition from the other top tier browsers. For the First Look at Opera 11, I'm Seth Rosenblatt.