Opera 12 Alpha - Wahoo Available for Download

Published on October 15, 2011 By DrJBHL In Personal Computing

Opera Software took the hardware acceleration plunge today with the release of its first alpha version of Opera 12, code-named Wahoo.

“The Norwegian browser maker had two priorities with acceleration, which is named after a fast-swimming fish, said Jan Standal, vice president of desktop products, in an interview at the company's Up North Web event here.

"One, it was more important to get it right than get it fast," Standal said. "Two, we wanted to reach as many users as possible." Jan Standal, VP Opera

"Reach" means offering hardware acceleration to those using the major OS’s, and those using Windows XP that IE9 doesn't support. Reaching XP isn't always possible, however. Like other browsers, Opera has a “blacklist” to disable hardware acceleration on some machines: Namely drivers which have bugs that won’t get updated anymore.

Opera 12 uses a display engine called “Vega” that taps into the GPU hardware power but that also falls back on the CPU for what they call "software acceleration." WebGL is needed for online 3D gaming, and it requires hardware acceleration, and that is available in Opera 12. Internet Explorer doesn’t support WebGL either although some think it will be in the future especially if Windows 8 wants the gaming crowd.

“This version of Opera has full hardware acceleration support. The browser is set to auto detect hardware acceleration capabilities of the graphics card. Opera notes that support works best if graphics card drivers are the most recent and that users may experience bugs in the alpha release.

Users who want to disable – or force – full hardware acceleration support in the browser need to open opera:config in the browser and filter for EnableHardwareAcceleration to disable (0), auto-detect (1) or force (2) hardware acceleration in the browser. Similar settings are available for the WebGL. Users need to filter for EnableWebGL to turn it off (0), auto-detect (1) or force on (2) the technology.” – M. Brinkmann, gHacks (bold font added by me)

I’m not into online gaming, so I downloaded and am trying out Opera 12 Alpha. It’s really fast, and the text rendering problem I had in Opera 11.51 is gone without a trace. However, the minimize, maximize and close browser buttons are not compatible with several skins I have tried. That’s a huge minus for me, so I’ve notified Opera about that, but don’t know if that will make much, if any difference.

Link to download Opera 12 Alpha: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

Sources:

http://www.ghacks.net/2011/10/13/opera-12-alpha/

http://www.zdnet.com/news/wahoo-hardware-acceleration-takes-center-stage-in-opera-12/6314382

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/10/13/introducing-opera-12-alpha

Comments

Philly0381

on Oct 15, 2011

I think I will stick with what I'm using, she was good enough to take to the dance, I think I'll take her home.

Neil Banfield

on Oct 17, 2011

For now you will need to disable hardware acceleration in Opera 12 if you wish to use it with WB.

Unfortunately they chose to use OpenGL and all the other browsers use DirectX and because of this I doubt we will be supporting Opera 12 any time soon. Should they switch to an DirectX backend all should be fine and it is possible they plan to implement one of these in the future too.

DrJBHL

on Oct 17, 2011

Neil, thanks for that input. Just disabled it in mine.

Hope they do choose Direct X. That fixed the min/max and close buttons issue I had with it.

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