Opera is an internet browser that came along long before big hitters like Firefox and Chrome.
Overview
Opera 12 keeps the general design and functionality of the highly-praised Opera 11, but adds convenient improved features like themes, web cam access and hardware acceleration. As for the the interface, Opera 12 features a slightly cleaner GUI with a focus on webpages instead of buttons and menus. Overall, Opera 12 isn't a huge change compared to the last version, but it has been improved with some nice new features.
Innovations and speed
The big innovation in the last version of Opera was extensions and while the choice of browser enhancements is still fairly limited, when you install or uninstall add-ons, you don't have to restart your browser. They are also sandboxed, so if one crashes, your browser won't. Opera 12 runs just as quickly as Google Chrome (the developer claims it's even faster) and the rendering engine has been tweaked slightly to offer an even faster browsing experience.
Visual Tabs and Tab Stacking is useful if you often have too many open, and there are now visual mouse gestures. These are well implemented, and accessed by holding the right mouse button which brings up a translucent guide to mouse gestures. This is a great introduction for people who've never used gestures, and hopefully allows for greater use in the future.
There's still an integrated mail client, which continues Opera's move towards doing everything you need in one application. The newest features or improvements of note are themes and web cam access. The most notable improvement has been to Speed Dial which instead of simply giving easy access to your favorite sites, now allows you to embed your Speed Dial with dynamic information - in other words, web apps within Opera. Meanwhile Password Syncing allows you to sync passwords across machines and devices - just sign-up for an account and Opera does the rest. There have also been some HTML5 improvements for developers such as Session History, Navigation and the W3C File API.
Conclusions
Opera 12 is a definite improvement on Opera 11 although the changes aren't revolutionary. However, if you're looking for a new browser, this is probably the most innovative currently on the market and is well worth installing.
Recent changes
DSK-379264 Enable SPDY by default for Opera Turbo
DSK-376350 Setting as default browser on Windows 8
CORE-49278 canvas globalAlpha rounding issues
CORE-49302 Speed Dial for Facebook blocked by Ghostery (URL Filter Conflicts between extensions)
DSK-379258 Debian package doesn't check for correct version of glibc
CORE-49298 Pasting text with trailing linebreaks puts the caret at the wrong place
DSK-377280 Date column not wide enough in mail
DSK-378043 Clicking 'Compose' with folder in Contacts selected does not add entire folder in 'To' field anymore
Pros
Incredibly fast
Handy Speed Dial functionality
Tab stacks
Mail client
Password Syncing
Cons
Fewer extensions than other browsers
