Opera Build 1090 Arrives, Adds Even More Features

The Next branch of Opera’s development has been updated to build 1090, with a number of interesting changes that see alterations to the skin’s appearance and improvements made to the plugin installation process. Of course, there is also the usual swathe of bug fixes and performance enhancements, and despite the fact that this is a fairly early glimpse of the next version of the browser, it already seems surprisingly stable and polished.

Opera is a web browser and Internet suite developed by Opera Software with over 200 million users worldwide. The browser handles common Internet-related tasks such as displaying web sites, sending and receiving e-mail messages, managing contacts, chatting on IRC, downloading files via BitTorrent, and reading web feeds. Opera is offered free of charge for personal computers and mobile phones.

Opera does not come packaged with any desktop operating system. However, it is the most popular desktop browser in some countries, such as Ukraine. Opera Mini, which is the most popular mobile web browser as of May 2011, has been chosen as the default integrated web browser in several mobile handsets by their respective manufacturers.
Features include tabbed browsing, page zooming, mouse gestures, and an integrated download manager. Its security features include built-in phishing and malware protection, SSL/TLS encryption when browsing HTTPS websites, and the ability to easily delete private data such as HTTP cookies.

Opera is known for originating many features later adopted by other web browsers. Opera runs on a variety of personal computer operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. Editions of Opera are available for devices using the Maemo, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Android, and iOS operating systems, as well as Java ME-enabled devices. Approximately 120 million mobile phones have been shipped with Opera. Opera is the only commercial web browser available for the Nintendo DS and Wii gaming systems. Some television set-top boxes use Opera. Adobe Systems has licensed Opera technology for use in the Adobe Creative Suite.

There are a number of changes that can be summed up as polishing -- icons and buttons have been updated as has the badge graphic. The overall size of the skin has been reduced in terms of file size, and the padding around some screen elements has been adjusted to improve alignment.

Problems stemming from Opera’s automatic updating have also been addressed, helping to avoid issues that crop up after updating. The plugin installation wizard has been tweaked so it is now possible to hide the plugin installer progress window, and crashes that occurred in previous builds have also been fixed.

Opera Next is available for Mac, Windows and Linux is shaping up well and the accelerated development cycle is comparable to that of Firefox. Across all platforms there are minor yet noticeable changes including tweaks to colorization in Windows and Linux to better match the color schemes of the two operating systems.