Opera 11 first beta released, adds extensions and tab stacking

The first beta of the new Opera 11 computer browser has just been released for public download. It adds several cool new features so it might be worth checking it out. The hottest new addition is tab stacking, a better way to organize your open tabs. Instead of opening tabs side-by-side, Opera 11 allows you to group them by site or by theme.

Also with its 11th version Opera joins the list of browsers that support extensions. There are currently 131 Opera extensions available and they have been downloaded half a million times since the alpha version of the browser was released three weeks ago. Opera claims that between 10 and 20 new extensions are submitted each day so when the Opera 11 release version hits it off there should be more than enough of those to pick from.



Next, Opera 11 introduces new mouse gestures. Built-in mouse gestures have been one of the coolest features of the Opera browser and now you can do more with them.
Other updates include load on-demand option for plug-ins (that can give you an performance boost of up to 30 percent), a bookmark toolbar, much like the one Mozilla Firefox has and hiding of unnecessary information in the address field (plus highlighting of the security status of each page).
Finally Opera 11 improves performance for Linux by up to 20 percent