11.50 Swordfish RC1

The development of a new version of the browser, which received the codename Swordfish, has been discontinued, and today the first candidate for release is immediately available in two branches. I recall 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 basic browser installation on your system.

Since the changes presented this week bypassed the blog of the browser on Habrahabr, I will take the liberty to describe them as well. RC obviously includes all 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 were promised a 10-15% improvement in the performance of the CSS parser thanks to the optimization of CSS Tokenizing. Extensions can now receive cookies from the browser, which means that you no longer need to enter your data for the extension separately. The ability to save the CSS source code before the parser has been added to the kernel, and it will include future versions of Dragonfly.

Full list of changes in the post of June 20.
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New theme

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

Click on the images below to see the entire screenshot.

Windows version

Mac version

Unix version

Download

The developers do not recommend upgrading the main browser to the new version, but if you still want to do it, use the installer from the second column of the table. This is exactly what I did and I am quite satisfied - no drops or degradations have been noticed in a few 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 entry in the Desktop Team blog, you can take a look at a small list of fixes.