Opera, known for its bold and innovative steps to make browsing a better experience has rolled out exciting new features in the latest release Opera 11.50 Read more…
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Opera, one of my favorite browsers, has upgraded itself to version 11. The Opera team has released the final version a few hours ago and is ready to download.
Opera 11 is packed with new features like:
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The Address bar is tweaked to offer enhanced security using badges corresponding to protocols like HTTP, HTTPS etc and integrated information about Turbo sessions.
- Auto update for extensions.
- New Bookmarks bar and Mail Panel
- Presto 2.7 engine for enhanced rendering of HTML5 and CSS3.
- Tab Stacking and Pin Tabs
- Visual mouse gestures.
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For some really strange reason, Google Instant (and the interactive Google Doodles) are not available on the Opera browser. The Google Instant search simply doesn’t happen while you’re on any version of Opera. So, if you are an Opera user and have been wondering how to get it working, maybe we can help:
1) While you are on Google’s homepage, ‘Right click’ > ‘Edit site preferences…’.
2) In the window that appears, choose ‘Network’ tab and then in ‘Browser identification’, select ‘Identify as Firefox’. Click OK.
That’s it. You’re done. Google Instant will work as beautifully as in other browsers. Just to make it clear, this is just a temporary fix from our side because the actual problem lies with Google. After Google stops discriminating Opera ;) you can change the setting back to ‘Identify as Opera’.
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Opera was probably the first to embrace (and innovate) the ‘speed dial’ feature that we now see in Google Chrome and Safari, giving you 1-click access to your favorite/most-visited sites. Now there are plenty of ways in which your can spice up Opera ‘Speed Dial’. One such is to add a quick local weather report in one of the speed dial boxes. My.Opera.com user BS-Harau shows a how to do it.
1) Copy this URL below and replace YOURCITY with your preferred city.
http://speeddial.operacesky.net/weather.php?lang=en&area=YOURCITY&top=100&redirect=http://my.opera.com/
2) On the Speed Dial Page, right click on any empty boxes, choose ‘Edit’ and then paste the URL in the text-box. Click OK.
3) To receive updated weather report every 15 minutes, just right-click the speed-dial box again and choose ‘Reload Every‘ > ‘15 minutes‘.
For more tips and tricks, click here.
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Google’s largest developer event, Google I/O, is being held at San Fran, California where Google just unleashed a third alternative for video in HTML5 – WebM. It is an open, royalty-free web media file format which aims to become the default standard for web videos.
The dilemma with the original two competitors for HTML5 video, namely Ogg Theora and H.264 was that Theora is open source and royalty free but a really low quality codec. While on the other hand, H.264 is better than Theora but is licenced to an entity called MPEG-LA which might not be acceptable to the big daddies.
Google introduced WebM and broke the decision deadlock. WebM incorporates the goodness of both. The video codec is based on VP8 by On2 (FYI: Theora is based on VP3) and the audio on Vorbis. A subset of Matroska media container will be used as a container for the audio and the video.
What’s more exciting is that Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Adobe and even Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM. In fact, the nightly builds of aforementioned browsers are already supporting WebM and are available for download.
Mozilla Firefox builds supporting WebM:
Download for Windows / 12.3MB
Download for Mac / 25MB
Download for Linux (Intel) / 11MB
Download for Linux (64-Bit Intel) / 12MB
Opera builds supporting WebM:
For Windows-
For Mac-
For Linux-
Google Chrome builds supporting WebM:
The Chromium blog reported that the dev channel build of Google Chrome supporting WebM will be out in few weeks. So stay tuned!
For Linux-
Now Ubuntu users can try Chromium’s latest build power-packed with WebM support.
Download Chromium latest Build for Ubuntu
With mighty Google at its side, backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WebM sure looks like the future of web videos. But are we missing someone special here? Yes. Apple. And Apple is fiercely in love with H.264. My guess is that we are going to witness yet another war of the codecs; WebM, backed by Google and Microsoft and H.264, allied with Apple. This is going to be interesting. Very. Interesting.
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This might come as a relief for web developers who want to test their site for cross device compatibility but are not able to try out their hands on smartphones. Opera launched the Opera Mobile Emulator to fill the gap whereby developers can get a taste of what to expect when a website is viewed on a mobile phone right on their desktops.
Opera Mobile emulator simulates the Opera’s smart phone browser right on your Windows, Mac or Linux desktop. It essentially renders pages as it would on a real smart phone. Moreover, you can pair it with Opera Dragonfly for further effective testing. Worried about widgets? Well, there’s also a Widget emulator included within the package for developing Opera widgets.
Download Opera Mobile Emulator / 11 MB
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Opera has this really nice feature to handle .torrent files itself with its integrated BitTorrent protocol solver. Turns out, most of the torrent users already have a client software like uTorrent for downloading torrents. So the BitTorrent feature in Opera not only becomes useless, it also gets quite irritating when downloading torrent files. What happens is, when ever you click on a .torrent file link, Opera tries to open the torrent in its own torrent client. To avoid this, you first need to save the .torrent file on your computer and then run it using your favorite torrent client software.
As a workaround for this little problem, you can disable Opera’s BitTorrent feature altogether.
1) In Opera’s address bar, type in ‘opera:config’ and press enter. This will open the Preferences Editor.
2) Now roll open the third option that says ‘BitTorrent’ and un-check ‘Enable’ checkbox. Click ‘Save’.
That’s it. Now whenever you click on a .torrent file link, it will open in your torrent client and not in Opera.
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