As the snow settles on the ground, and the elves draw close to finishing construction of all their toy orders, it may not surprise you to learn that Opera's little helpers have also been very busy, adding exciting new innovations to our desktop browser!

As a last release before Christmas, we are bringing you a new labs release featuring two exquisitely wrapped presents:

• 64-bit builds
• Out-of-process plug-ins

Let's look at these features in more detail.

Out-of-process plug-ins

We monitor our built-in crash logger carefully to see what is still causing browser crashes, post release. One very common source of instability is one that we unfortunately can't fix ourselves: browser plug-ins. We fixed this problem for Opera on Linux and FreeBSD a long time ago by running plug-ins in a separate process. This allows us to control exactly what communication takes place between Opera and running plug-ins, improving security and stability in the process. If a plug-in accidentally crashes under this system, Opera will keep on running, and a simple page reload will correct the plug-in.

This architecture is now coming to a Windows or Mac machine near you! This labs release provides an early preview of the new rewritten version for Mac/Win/Linux/FreeBSD, constructed to allow our code to work across all platforms.

64-bit builds

Bringing the out-of-process plug-in architecture across to Windows and Mac also brings another advantage: the ability to run plug-ins compiled for Intel 32-bit architecture from within a 64-bit Opera process. And 64-bit Opera is the other delightful gift we're giving you at Opera Labs this Christmas!

64-bit Windows and Mac have been in the works for a while, but we didn't want to release them until we had a way of running all plug-ins that's completely transparent to the user: This is now possible with the out-of-process plug-in architecture, so here we are! The 64-bit versions of Opera offer performance improvements in some specific areas and allow Opera to have more freedom in allocating memory.

Download Builds!

• Windows 32-bit
• Windows 64-bit
• Mac 32/64-bit
• Linux/FreeBSD builds directory

Release notes and known issues

Mac

• The Mac version is a dual build containing both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Opera. Mac OS 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and newer will automatically run the 64-bit version; older versions will fall back to the 32-bit version.
• Text is sometimes incorrectly drawn: some bits or entire blocks are skipped, and letters might be wrongly displayed.
• Web fonts do not work yet. We recommend setting opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableWebfonts to 0 to disable web fonts.

Windows

• On 64-bit Windows versions, you can choose between the separate 32-bit and 64-bit builds.
• On 32-bit Windows versions only the 32-bit build will work.
• Older versions of Flash might give performance problems. Use the newest version of Flash to test this build.
• Interactions with plug-ins may occasionally freeze Opera for 7 seconds.

Linux/FreeBSD

Xt-based plugins are not supported, for example VLC and Adobe Reader.

Note on bug reporting: This build is based on Opera 12 (Wahoo) therefore it includes all the features from recent Opera Next snapshots, including hardware acceleration. When reporting plug-in bugs in this build, it's always interesting to know if hardware acceleration is on or off, and if toggling it makes a difference. You can turn off hardware acceleration by setting opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableHardwareAcceleration to 0 and restarting the browser.

Chris Mills

Chris Mills is a web technologist, open standards evangelist and education agitator, currently working at Opera Software in the developer relations team. He spends most of his time writing articles about web standards for dev.opera.com and other publications (such as .net mag and A List Apart), giving talks at universities and industry conferences, and lobbying universities to improve their web education courses. He believes that education is the answer to everything, but in particular he is passionate about using education to improve the overall content quality, accessibility, usability and future-viability of the Web. He is the creator of the Opera Web standards curriculum, contributor to the WaSP InterACT project, and coauthor of InterACT with web standards: A Holistic Approach to Web Design. In August 2011, he also accepted the position of co-chair of the newly-formed Web Education Community Group. Outside work he is a heavy metal drummer, proud father of three and lover of good beer.