Opera 12, released today, offers a lot more eye candy and extra fun, as well as useful tweaks. You can now apply one of hundreds of themes to customise the look of the browser, and you can surf in confidence knowing that even if a plugin crashes, Opera won’t.
The themes work just the way they do for Chrome and Firefox browsers. In Opera, go to Tools > Appearance… and then browse for a theme to apply.
A cooky new feature is Opera’s new built-in apps that use your webcam: take a Polaroid-style or fun booth-like photo of yourself in the browser, or play a game where you have to move your head to avoid asteroids. Sounds great if you have time to kill.
More importantly, Opera 12 has beefed up its security features so it’s easier to quickly see and understand sites’ security and privacy policies. This makes it easy to see if a website is accessing your location information, for example.
Lots of other extras come with the upgrade, including running plugins in a separate process, faster page-loading and rendering, 64-bit Windows and Mac support, and support for more languages. If Opera 12 is still not fast enough for you (even though Opera vs 11.6 won a bunch of speed tests in our browser comparison), you can try experimental hardware acceleration.
Head over to Opera.com for the download, which installs faster than ever, or read more about the update in Opera’s press release.
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