Opera old and new on a Galaxy Nexus. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

The new WebKit-based Opera is not just different under the hood, for all intents and purposes this is a totally new web browser and, surprise!, it’s better than its predecessor.

If you’d like to take this beta for a spin, head over to the Google Play Store. The Opera Mobile beta requires Android 2 or better and, fear not, it’s a separate app so you can keep the old version around if you’d like.

Last month Opera announced it would be abandoning the Presto rendering engine that has been the basis of the browser since its inception. Instead the company will use the WebKit rendering engine for all its future releases, starting with this Opera Mobile for Android beta.

The revamped Opera for Android isn’t just different under the hood, Opera has redesigned the entire browser from the ground up opting for a more Android-native look. The new user interface is cleaner and reminiscent of Chrome for Android with a single menu button at the top of the screen rather than the space-eating toolbar found in the old Opera Mobile. While I prefer the new UI, it’s worth noting that the new design is decidedly less thumb-friendly.

Other cosmetic changes include combining the URL bar and search bar, and a new tab switching interface also similar to what you’ll find in Safari on iOS.

However, while the first WebKit-based Opera Mobile is clearly different it manages to retain, and even improve on, much of what made (makes) Opera unique.

For example, Opera Mobile’s trademark “Speed Dial” page has been revamped and is much easier to customize with your favorite sites. Speed Dial now looks and behaves much like the home screen on iOS. You can even drag your bookmarks and favorites on top of each other to create folders. The changes make it possible to fit more links in less space.

Opera Mobile’s new iOS-ified Speed Dial screen. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Also new in this release is what Opera is calling “Off-Road” mode — the data compressing power of Opera Mini is now available (when you want it) in Opera Mobile. Off-Road mode uses Opera’s servers to compress webpages before they’re sent on to your device. That means faster browsing on slower networks. Off-Road can even save you money if you’re caught roaming or running out of data on a limited data plan. Unlike Opera Mini, which always compresses pages, Opera Mobile allows you to toggle the Off-Road settings.

Opera’s simplified menu with “Off-Road” toggle. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

Opera Mobile’s Save for Later feature can also save on bandwidth if you download pages for offline reading while you’re connected to Wi-Fi.

While there is much to love about the new Opera for Android beta, be forewarned that it is very much a beta. In my testing it was stable enough, but Off-Road mode frequently failed to render pages and there’s currently no way to sync your Opera Link data. Provided Opera works out the bugs though Opera Mobile is shaping up to be one of the best browsers on Android.

Opera software announced this morning that it is dumping its homegrown Presto rendering engine in favor of the increasingly ubiquitous WebKit rendering engine.

For all new products Opera will use WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as its JavaScript engine, mirroring what you’ll find in Google’s Chrome browser. Apple’s Safari also uses WebKit, though it has its own JavaScript engine.

Writing on the Opera Developer Blog, Opera’s Bruce Lawson says the first WebKit-based Opera browser “will be for smartphones, which we’ll demonstrate at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona at the end of the month.”

While Opera’s desktop market share hovers around 2 to 4 percent, the company’s two mobile browsers have, until very recently, been the most used mobile browsers on the web.

Indeed, while Opera’s official announcement is vague about the reasons for the switch, it doesn’t take a soothsayer to know that the reason is mobile. One influencing factor is no doubt the fact that Apple’s iOS only allows third-party web browsers if they use the built-in WebKit rendering engine.

Then there’s the -webkit CSS vendor prefix problem. At least some of the blame for Presto’s demise falls on web developers for developing against WebKit, rather than using web standards.

CSS vendor prefixes were designed to help web developers by giving them a way to target CSS to specific browsers and use proposed standards before they were finalized. The idea was to move the web forward without rushing the CSS standards process. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always worked out that way. In fact, web developers fell in love with the -webkit prefix and often forget that there are other prefixes as well: -o for Opera, -moz for Firefox and -ms for Internet Explorer.

Using only -webkit means sites break in Opera even though Opera could have rendered the site just fine if the developer had bothered to include the -o prefix.

Of course, as Mozilla’s Christian Heilmann points out, “content not showing up or showing up broken in your product is terrible for a commercial company — the web is never wrong, if your browser shows it wrongly it is your fault, right?”

It would always be Opera’s fault in the eyes of most users and that’s why the company decided to support the -webkit prefix last year. In many ways today’s announcement is just one step further — if you’re going to support the prefix, why not just use the rendering engine? That seems to be exactly what Opera has decided to do.

So what becomes of the Opera features you know and love? The DragonFly developer tools are most likely done for, WebKit already has its own developer tools. It’s less clear what might happen to Opera’s other unique features like the built-in e-mail client or Opera Turbo, which compresses webpages to give broadband-like speeds on almost any internet connection.

An Opera spokesperson declined to comment on the future of any Opera features, telling Webmonkey only that “compression is in Opera’s DNA, but other than that we don’t talk about features of unreleased products.”

While I’m optimistic about Opera’s WebKit future, it’s hard to see the loss of a rendering engine as anything but bad news for the web. One less rendering engine means one less way to discover and fix bugs in web standards, one less place to see what you’ve done wrong. And Opera, while sometimes difficult to test in, was almost always right when it came to implementing web standards. In 13 years of building websites I’ve found no other testing environment in which I knew that if something didn’t work, it was almost certainly my code that was wrong. And I’m not alone; apparently even some Chromium developers feel the same way.

But that won’t stop developers who’d like to see a monoculture of WebKit from shortsightedly cheering this news.

Mozilla developer Robert O’Callahan summarizes why a WebKit-centric web is not a good thing:

some people are wondering whether engine diversity really matters. ‘Webkit is open source so if everyone worked together on it and shipped it, would that be so bad?’ Yes. Web standards would lose all significance and standards processes would be superseded by Webkit project decisions and politics. Webkit bugs would become the standard: there would be no way for developers to test on multiple engines to determine whether an unexpected behavior is a bug or intended.

WebKit makes a fine rendering engine and it does a good job of keeping up with web standards, but don’t assume that just because a web browser uses WebKit under the hood that it will render your pages the same as every other WebKit browser. Just look at the rendering and feature differences between Chrome, Safari, Mobile Safari and Mobile Chrome to get a sense of the pain that awaits developers yearning for a WebKit monoculture.

The other possible downside to a WebKit Opera is that the company’s once mighty voice for standards may not be heard as clearly amid the Google- and Apple-dominated WebKit developer culture.

Hopefully the WebKit community will find a place for the developers who brought us tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, “Speed Dial”, Turbo, and an uncompromising support for web standards that made Opera one of the first browsers to pass both the ACID 2 and ACID 3 page-rendering tests. For its part Opera is starting off on the right foot, offering up code that brings Presto-quality support for the CSS Multi-column Layout Module to WebKit.

Hopefully Opera engineers will continue to bring the same kind of innovation to WebKit and Chromium as they did to Presto and with any luck WebKit will listen and the web will end up a better, if less diverse, place.

Opera 12.10 on a Samsung Windows 8 tablet. Image: Scott Gilbertson

Opera has updated its flagship desktop web browser to version 12.10, which offers several speed improvements, new goodies for web developers and better integration with Apple’s latest Retina screen laptops.

To grab a copy of Opera 12.10 beta for Windows, Mac or Linux, head on over to the Opera download page.

Among Opera 12.10′s standout features is baked-in support for the new SPDY network standard, which offers faster, more secure connections to websites that support it, including big names like Gmail and Twitter.

Opera 12.10 now supports the latest Web Sockets implementation, which fixes the security flaws that previously forced Opera to remove Web Sockets support. Web Sockets are back on by default. Another web standards improvement in Opera 12.10 is support for more “unprefixed” CSS rules, including transitions, transforms, gradients, and animations, all of which will now work without the -o- prefix.

Web developers starting to play with the new CSS Flexible Box Layout Module syntax can now test layouts in Opera 12.10. Check out CSS guru Chris Coyer’s earlier rundown of what’s changed recently with Flexbox.

There’s good news for Mac users in this release — Opera 12.10 is the first to support Apple’s high-res display, making it well worth the update if you’ve got one of the new Retina MacBook Pros. Other Mac improvements include support for new features in OS X Mountain Lion, like the new Notification Center and the built-in content sharing through any social network accounts you’ve set up.

Windows 8 users will be happy to know that basic touch support now works in Windows 8. It’s nowhere near as nice as what you’ll find in IE 10 or Firefox, but it’s a start.

Opera Mobile 12.1. Image: Scott Gilbertson.

Opera Software has released a new version of Opera Mobile for Android phones. This update doesn’t offer many visible new features, but under the hood there are quite a few improvements that make Opera Mobile 12.1 well worth the upgrade.

You can grab the new Opera Mobile 12.1 for Android from the Google Play Store. Unlike some Android browsers, which only support the latest Android release, Opera Mobile has you covered all the way from Android 1.6 Donut to the latest and greatest, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

Like Opera 12.10 for the desktop the new Mobile 12.1 adds support for the SPDY protocol, WebSockets and a host of new HTML APIs. Opera Mobile’s support for the SPDY network standard, which promises to be even faster than the HTTP protocol, is especially welcome since it means speedier page loads on SPDY-enabled sites like Twitter and Gmail.

Opera Mobile 12.1 also introduces support for more “unprefixed” CSS rules, including transitions, transforms, gradients, animations and flexbox, all of which will now work without the -o- prefix. For now any code you have with an -o- prefix will still work as well, but make sure you’re including the unprefixed rule too since eventually Opera (and every other browser vendor) will drop support for the prefixed versions.

This is the first mobile release to introduce support for some -webkit- prefixes on poorly coded sites that don’t use unprefixed versions of stable CSS properties. Opera’s decision to support another browser’s CSS prefix has caused considerable outcry among web developers and members of the CSS Working Group, which created vendor prefixes. While the controversial -webkit- prefix support has been around in preview versions of both desktop and mobile builds, this the first official mobile release to support it.

For complete details on how Opera’s -webkit- prefix support works, as well as the details on everything that’s new in Opera Mobile 12.1 — like support for Drag and Drop, the Clipboard API and the Page Visibility API — be sure to read Opera’s blog post.

Opera 12.10 supports Mac OS X’s built-in social networking tools. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Opera has released a new beta version of its flagship desktop web browser with quite a few goodies for both web developers and anyone using Apple’s latest Retina Macbook Pros.

To grab a copy of Opera 12.10 beta for Windows, Mac or Linux, head on over to the Opera Next download page.

This is the first Opera release to support Apple’s high-res display and Opera 12.10 is well worth the update — even as a beta release — if you’ve got one of the new Retina MacBook Pros. The beta also taps into some of the new features in OS X Mountain Lion, including support for the new Notification Center and the built-in content sharing through any social network accounts you’ve set up.

Among the other standout features in this release are the new web standards APIs Opera now supports, including the Context Menu API, the Fullscreen API and the Page Visibility API. All three APIs give web developers more control over how things look, but the Page Visibility API might be the most useful since it allows you to reduce the amount of resources your page uses when it’s in the background.

With Opera on board, the Page Visibility API now works in all desktop browsers (though not in most mobile browsers). If you’d like to learn more the Mozilla developer network has a good tutorial on Page Visibility.

Opera 12.10 now supports the latest Web Sockets implementation, which fixes the security flaws that previously forced Opera to remove Web Sockets support. The 12.10 beta turns Web Sockets back on by default. Another web standards improvement in Opera 12.10 is support for more “unprefixed” CSS rules, including transitions, transforms, gradients, and animations, all of which will now work without the -o- prefix.

As we noted back when it was was part of an Opera Labs release, the new 12.10 beta supports the SPDY network standard, which promises to be even faster than the HTTP protocol, though thus far few websites are using it. With this release SPDY is on by default and will work anywhere SPDY is used, notably at the two biggest SPDY-using websites — Gmail and Twitter.

Webmonkey is in your Opera Mini Smart Page, making you smarter. Image: Webmonkey.

Opera software has released Opera Mini 7.5 for Android.

To update or install Opera Mini on your Android device, head on over to m.opera.com or Google Play.

The latest version of Opera’s lightweight, speedy mobile browser — not to be confused with the much more full-featured Opera Mobile — adds a new feature, the “Smart Page,” for what Opera calls “social snacks.”

The new Smart Page is a social media and news aggregator, offering one-stop access to your friends’ updates from Facebook or Twitter, as well as news from the websites you visit most frequently.

Because Opera Mini proxies your internet connection through Opera’s servers, making page downloads considerably smaller and faster, the company can use the sites you’ve visited to compile what amounts to ad hoc feeds for your most visited sites. As with all things automated, the more you use Opera Mini the better your news results will be.

Opera Mini is also available for iOS and other platforms, but so far this latest version is only available on Android. An Opera spokesperson declined to comment on when other Opera Mini releases might be updated.

To see the new Smart Page feature in action, check out this video:

Is it Opera or is it WebKit? Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

If you’re curious and want to see how Opera handles -webkit prefixes, head on over to Opera and download the latest version of Opera Next for Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, Mac or Linux. (Keep in mind that 12.50 is still a very early release and contains some known bugs.)

Opera’s decision to support another browser’s CSS prefix code has caused considerable outcry among web developers and members of the CSS Working Group, which created vendor prefixes.

CSS vendor prefixes were designed to help web developers by giving them a way to target CSS to specific browsers and use proposed standards before they were finalized. The idea was to move the web forward without rushing the CSS standards process. Unfortunately, it hasn’t always worked out that way. In fact, web developers fell in love with the -webkit prefix and often forget that there are other prefixes as well: -o for Opera, -moz for Firefox and -ms for Internet Explorer.

The problem, in Opera’s view, is that instead of writing code that will work in any web browser, some of even the largest sites on the web are coding exclusively for WebKit (the rendering engine that powers web browsers on the iPhone, iPad and Android phones). Web developers have, the argument goes, created the same sort of monoculture that used to exist around Internet Explorer, with websites proudly proclaiming they “work best in WebKit.”

Opera decided that, in order to remain competitive, it needed to support -webkit in addition to its normal -o prefix.

The company previously updated its mobile emulator tool to support -webkit, but Opera 12.50 is the first actual browser release to do so.

Naturally the -webkit prefix support isn’t the only thing new in Opera 12.50. This release also manages to pack in an implementation of the Clipboard API, and Mac Opera users will find that Opera 12.50 uses Mac OS X 10.8’s coming Notification Center.

Photo: dark_ghetto28/Flickr

The latest Labs release of Opera’s flagship desktop web browser adds support for the nascent SPDY protocol.

You can download the latest Opera Labs build for Windows 32-bit, Windows 64-bit, Mac and Linux from Opera.

SPDY, pronounced “speedy,” is a replacement for the HTTP protocol — the language currently used when your browser talks to a web server. When you request a webpage or a file from a server, chances are your browser sends that request using HTTP. The server answers using HTTP, too. This is why “http” appears at the beginning of most web addresses.

The SPDY protocol handles all the same tasks as HTTP, but SPDY can do it all about 50 percent faster.

SPDY started life as a proprietary protocol at Google and worked only in the company’s Chrome web browser. SPDY has since won support elsewhere, with Firefox and Chrome already shipping with SPDY built-in.

Opera hasn’t announced when SPDY support will arrive in the stable release, but when it does the majority of browsers on the web will support the SPDY protocol. The major missing player is Microsoft, which has proposed a slightly different take on the same ideas behind SPDY. Which one becomes an official standard is up to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which is in the process of creating HTTP 2.0, a faster, modern approach to internet communication.

To notice any SPDY-related speed improvements in the latest version of Opera Labs you’ll have to connect to SPDY servers. Although not yet widespread, SPDY is already enabled on some very large sites, including Google’s main search page, Gmail and Twitter among others. Also, note that you don’t need to type spdy://somesite.com. When the browser uses SPDY it all happens transparently behind the scenes.

If you’d like to get your own site serving over SPDY, check out mod_spdy, a SPDY module for the Apache server (currently a beta release) or read up on Nginx’s preliminary support.

Opera 12 with the "White Lion" theme. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Opera Software has released Opera 12, a major update for the company’s flagship desktop web browser.

If you’d like to take Opera 12 for a spin, head over to Opera’s download page. Current Opera users will be automatically updated.

Opera 12 packs in dozens of new features and is considerably snappier than its predecessors. Part of that speed comes from Opera 12′s 64-bit support on Windows and Mac. Startup and shutdown times have been reduced as well thanks to what Opera calls “smarter tab loading.”

As we mentioned in our beta review, Opera 12 offers experimental WebGL hardware acceleration. Opera’s plans for hardware acceleration go beyond just web content, using your graphics processor to boost the rendering speed of the browser’s user interface as well. While the hardware acceleration is available in this release, you’ll still need to turn it on yourself. See Opera’s earlier guide to enabling hardware acceleration, which also has some good reasons why you might want to wait until it’s finalized before you make the leap.

Opera 12 puts Flash and other plugins out to pasture. All plugins are now “out-of-process,” which means that Flash and other plugins now run in separate processes from the browser itself. That way, should Flash crash, it won’t cause the entire browser to crash with it. Like Chrome and Firefox before it, Opera 12′s isolated processes feature applies to plugins like Flash, Silverlight and Java, among others.

This is first Opera browser to support themes. There’s a new themes gallery you can check out if you’d like to customize Opera’s look.

Opera has long been a pioneer of web standards and this release continues that tradition, bringing support for a wide variety of emerging web standards like CSS 3 Animations and Transitions, and HTML5 Drag-and-Drop. Opera 12 also supports the Web Real Time Communication (WebRTC) standard. Opera has set up some demos to show off the new WebRTC features, including a series of apps that pull images (with your permission) from your webcam. Be sure to visit Photo Booth, Polaroid, and the very cool FaceKat — a driving game you steer with your head — to see the WebRTC support in action.

Opera 12 is also notable for some things it doesn’t include, namely Opera Unite and Opera Widgets. Widgets are easily replaced with add-ons, but Unite has no successor. Unite, which allowed you to host a simple website directly on your own computer, is no longer available by default and the company is no longer actively developing it.

The desktop version of Opera is not the most widely used browser on the web by any measure, but it is responsible for much of the innovation we’ve seen in web browsers over the years. If you’ve never used Opera, Opera 12 makes a good introduction. For more details on everything that’s new in this release, check out Opera’s release notes.

Can you hear me now? Photo by Aramolara/Flickr.

Opera’s numbers were gathered in conjunction with mobile research firm On Device Research and are pulled from some 34,000 users in 22 different countries across four continents over the course of one year (Nov. 2010 to Nov. 2011).

There are two lessons for web developers in this report. First, globally, mobile is not the future of the web — it’s the now of the web. And second, hiding content on the mobile version of a website means a significant number of users will never see that content at all since they only access sites via a mobile device. Consider your hidden-from-mobile content non-existent content.

Naturally every website’s audience and needs are different. If your site is U.S.-centric then Opera’s report may have very little bearing on your users, but for those who’d like to expand to, or are already serving a global market, clearly making sure your site works well on mobile devices is key.

Delving into the Opera-centric portion of data offers some insights for developers as well, namely that building WebKit-only sites is not a good idea.

It’s one thing to know that building sites that only support the -webkit browser prefix is bad form, it’s another thing to realize it may be costing you money.

Not only are Opera Mobile and Mini the most widely used mobile browsers worldwide — which means not supporting them excludes the majority of mobile users from your site — according to Opera’s white paper, 55 percent of Opera users make purchases on their mobile devices. Only 43 percent of people without Opera installed do the same. In other words, websites that don’t support Opera on mobile may well be losing money.

Unfortunately, Opera is going forward with its plan to support -webkit, so possibly WebKit-only websites may work in Opera Mobile at some point in the future. But if you want to support Opera (and other browsers) today be sure to use all the various browser prefixes when writing your CSS. You can even take advantage of automated prefixing solutions to do all the hard work for you.

For more info on Opera’s data be sure to check out the actual white paper (.pdf) which also provides some more country-by-country data for those interested in what mobile trends look like in specific parts of the world.