Bad weather is excellent for coding. The darker and colder it is outside, the more we can enjoy working on what we love. You probably know what I’m talking about, because, in a recent survey, more than half of you answered that you work in IT. Well, today’s news is for you: Opera 27 is going beta.

Let’s take a look at what’s in Opera 27:

Improved navigation

Many of you have raised the issue that the navigation panel does not work with dark backgrounds, because the background was faded out to make the buttons more visible. Now, you can use the darkest possible background, and it will still look good.



Tab menu

If you look up at your browser interface right now and see more than 5 tabs open, you can consider yourself unique. Only 5% of users have that many tabs open on average. (And, yes, you most probably also have a quite new computer with tons of RAM to handle it.) We have created the tab menu especially for you. (Many users will most likely not ever see it, because they won’t ever reach the number of tabs needed to activate it.)



Last, but not least

There is also a long list of small improvements in this release, including:

Invitation to migrate your Adobe Flash from NPAPI to PPAPI

Addition of some APIs

Improvements to the shutdown functionality

Speech API

Although, I’m not sure why I wrote this here, since you all read the changelog, anyway.

Downloads:

The full list of fixes is available in the changelog.