Opera 11.50 - New Features

Yesterday Opera 11.50 was released in its final form. To be honest I didn't expect much. Despite the fact I'm talking about my favorite browser here I must admit that starting around version 10 Opera went down for me - huge memory usage frequent crashes various issues with sites that worked well in any other browser... but now it seems all that has finally come to an end! As I write this I have nothing but good words about Opera 11.50 so let's take a quick look at the new things and improvements it brings shall we?

The official Opera homepage shows a download count of over 10300000 that keeps growing at an alarming rate I could say. Alarming for other browsers that keep going down with each new version of course - no need to give you any names here right? If you want to check all the improvements and new things in Opera 11.50 (for Windows) then you'd better go right here. For those who are not that curious here's what I think that really matters...

- Improved Opera Link: now you can sync your passwords too. While some may feel their privacy threatened I think this is a great addition - after all I am not planning any terror attacks I don't send or receive illegal pornographic materials via email... so I couldn't care less if Obama himself will be checking my emails tomorrow morning. Sure I also have some passwords to various blogs I own or write on but those are not the kind of passwords to store in ANY browser.

- Speed/reliability improvements: I didn't perform any synthetic benchmark yet and I can even dare to say that I'm not expecting any improvements there but what really matters is memory usage and the amount of crashes I get. Since I upgraded I had no crashes while memory usage is much better than before - with 21 tabs open I see Opera using 340 MB of physical memory and about 500 MB swap space. I know that doesn't sound too good but you don't want to know how bad it was before!

- Speed Dial improvements: more customizable than before now sporting Speed Dial extensions - "small web pages embedded in your Speed Dial powered by Opera's extension framework" as described in the official changelog. Pretty cool if you ask me. ;)

Other than the above there are plenty of minor fixes and improvements but I think we covered the things that really matter already so... that's all of it I guess. Enjoy Opera 11.50 people because there's a lot to enjoy trust me!