Opera 12 Beta Launches, Loses Voice, Unite and Widgets

Opera is launching the first official beta of the next version of its desktop browser today. As usual, the Opera 12 beta includes a number of new features and enhancements, but this release also marks the end of some of the company’s more ambitious projects. With Opera 12, the company is ending support for Unite, the browser’s built-in personal cloud/streaming media platform that made its debut in 2009, and Opera Widgets. Opera is also phasing out support for its built-in speech recognition, text-to-speech and VoiceXML technologies.

This release isn’t just about removing features, though. Far from it. Among the new features is a new engine for writing and displaying browser themes (Opera previously called these ‘skins’). Read more...