11.50 Swordfish RC1

The development of a new version of the browser, code-named Swordfish, has been discontinued, and today the first release candidate in two branches has become available. Let me remind you that not so long ago all browser snapshots began to be published in a separate branch of Opera Next, where you can take a look at the latest changes without updating the main browser installation on your system.

Since the changes presented this week bypassed the browser blog on Habrahabr, I will take the liberty to describe them. RC obviously includes all of these changes and is available for download at the end of the post.

Presto 2.9

In the snapshot of June 20, the Presto version increased to 2.9, and we are promised a 10-15% improvement in CSS parser performance thanks to CSS Tokenizing optimization. Extensions can now receive cookies from the browser, which means that there is no longer any need to enter your data for the extension separately. The kernel has added the ability to save CSS source code before applying the parser, and it will include future versions of Dragonfly.

Full list of changes in the post of June 20.

New theme

On June 22, developers also introduced a new lightweight design theme, which includes Swordfish - a new set of icons, brighter but softer colors for the background and border, improvements in various indents and alignments, an updated design and contents of the status bar. Also, the buttons in the address panel have finally removed the borders, and the buttons "Home" and "Fast Forward" have become optional. In the version for OS X - a new gradient window.

Click on the images below to see the full screenshot.

Windows version

Mac version

Unix Version

Download

Developers do not yet recommend updating the main browser to a new version, but if you still want to do this, use the installer from the second column of the table. This is exactly what I did and am quite satisfied - no falls or degradations were noticed during several hours of active surfing.

Opera Next (1067)	Opera Swordfish RC (1067)
Windows	Windows rc
Mac	Mac rc
Linux / FreeBSD	Linux / FreeBSD RC

In the RC1 blog post on the Desktop Team blog, you can take a look at a short list of fixes.