Opera Software has released Opera 12.10. This latest version of the desktop browser is a recommended upgrade for all Opera 12.x and previous users as it fixes security issues in the browser.

The new feature in Opera 12.10 is the inclusion of new Speed Dial extensions that are displayed in the browser's right-click context menu.

When the Opera 12.1 beta was released at the beginning of October it introduced the Context Menu API as a way to integrate extensions in the context menu and now end users reap the benefits with a handful of off-the-shelf extensions for Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Gismeteo and others.

Version 12.10 better better integration for both Windows and Mac. Windows 7 and 8 users can now make use of inertia scrolling and pinch-to-zoom, while Mac users will notice support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center and built-in sharing of pages. Mac users who run a device with Apple’s Retina display can now benefit from this as well when they run the Opera browser. It also supports International Color Consortium (ICC) profile v4, which will make photographs more vibrant and colorful.

The integration of the SPDY (‘speedy’) networking protocol, the technology developed by Google to reduce web page latency, means that users of this version should notice a speed increase on sites such as Gmail, Twitter,  WordPress and other Google sites.

For developers as well as the Context Menu API  there's a Resource Loader API that provides the option to load resources from other parts of an extension; a Screenshot API that enables extension developers to create screenshots of the visible part of the screen, and an update to the URL Filter API.

Opera 12.10 adds partial support for the HTML5 Fullscreen API that allows video, games or web pages to use the whole screen and for the Page Visibility API that allows a tab to know if it isn't visible. It also has web sockets security turned on by default.

Being keen on standards, Opera 12.10 now supports unprefixed CSS transitions, transforms, gradients, animations and flexbox and introduces support for some webkit prefixes on sites that don't correctly use unprefixed versions of stable CSS properties. Quite a mess the prefixed CSS fiasco isn't it and yet I doubt that anyone has learned the lesson as yet.

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