• Last week and Today: Opera announced working on version 11 of its desktop browser and released Opera 11 alpha for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
• Version 11 Features: Comes with a new layout engine (Presto 2.6.37) improving performance, adding bug fixes, enhancing Web standards support and Websockets support. Windows has a new faster installer with 10% smaller download size.
• Biggest New Feature - Opera Extensions: Allows adding features directly into the browser. Extensions use open standards like HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and supported APIs. They are based on the W3C Widget specification and the company aims to make porting from other browsers easy.
• How to Create an Extension: Read tutorials and guides, develop code and upload to the Opera extensions webpage. Opera checks for defects and malicious software.
• Milestone Significance: Marks an important milestone as Opera has always insisted on including features in the browser. Google added extension support in Chrome 4, Apple in Safari 5 and Firefox has had them for years. Opera joins the trend by adding extensions.