Opera 12 Alpha Releases With Hardware Acceleration For Browser

Opera is out with its latest web browser making its first effort at hardware accelerated browsers. Originally, GPU-accelerated browsers were to be an Opera 11 feature but were postponed till Opera 12's release. The Opera 12 GPU-accelerated browser (code-named Wahoo)  is only an 'alpha' version and Opera has warned users of encountering impediments while running the software.

One could expect a faster performance, lower battery consumption and bonus features when running a hardware-accelerated browser. Opera 12 uses hardware for its Vega display engines, font display, CSS and WebGL graphics. The Vega is supposed to draw its performance from the GPU but is also enabled to revert back to CPU acceleration or "software acceleration." This is helpful in case the graphic card is not detected or blocked for some reason. The initial configuration is to use OpenGL interface but this can also be switched to DirectX on Windows.

 


Opera 12 Wahoo

Opera is aiming to approach desktop browsers with a newer perspective with its hardware acceleration. Though the goal is to reach as many users as possible, there is always a possibility that some drivers may not be supported, especially in older versions of Windows. To counter that, Opera has included a blacklist to disable hardware acceleration on some machines. This could be done by setting opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableHardwareAcceleration to zero and restarting Opera.

Among other features for the Opera 12 is the new  Ragnarök HTML5 parser, improved memory efficiency, complete support for EcmaScript 5.1 and the ability to control the computer's camera.  The company hopes to ship Opera 12 by this year's end.

Via: #-Link-Snipped-#