Social Media websites, whose very existence is threatened by SOPA, were amongst the biggest gainers in 2011, suggests a report published by Opera Software. The latest edition of Opera’s monthly State of the Mobile Web report, which is generated using aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers, takes a look at the top mobile websites at the end of 2011.

Unsurprisingly, Google Search topped the list, while Facebook held on to its position as runners-up. Wikipedia, Blogger, Spaces, Twitter and YouTube were amongst the gainers this year. Predictably enough, Wapdam, Orkut, Detik and Live vanished from the top 20, while Yahoo fell by a couple of spots. The top ten mobile websites, as reported by Opera are:

1. google.com
2. facebook.com
3. youtube.com (up 1)
4. vkontakte.ru (down 1)
5. odnoklassniki.ru
6. yandex.ru
7. wikipedia.org (up 4)
8. my.opera.com
9. yahoo.com (down 2)
10. twitter.com (up 2)

Opera Mini itself experienced a year-on-year growth of 80.6%. It finished November 2011 with 144.6 million users, a 3.3% increase from October. Opera Mini users viewed over 88.5 billion pages, which would have normally generated 13.2 petabytes of traffic. However, thanks to its server side compression algorithm, Opera Mini managed to reduce network traffic to less than 1.5 petabytes.

Most of Opera Mini’s growth came from Latin America and Africa. Asia, where Opera Mini has always been popular, continued to display impressive growth, but North America once again proved to be a tough nut to crack.

Opera 11.60 or Tunny is now available for download. Tunny is an interim release that is meant to deliver many of the new features that were originally planned for Opera 12 or Wahoo, which got delayed as hardware acceleration is not yet ready for prime time.

Opera 11.60 has a fairly impressive changelog for a point release. It beefs up Opera’s standards support in a big way. Besides a brand new HTML5 parser that is expected to improve interoperability and website compatibility, Opera Tunny ships with a new version of Carakan (JavaScript engine), full ECMAScript 5.1 support and support for CSS3 radial gradients.

The user interface has been refined further. The address bar has been streamlined. As a result, it looks a lot better and simpler, but is also somewhat less useful. The single click bookmark option (“Star button”) that has been a standard feature in most other browsers for quite some time also makes its appearance in Tunny. However, the biggest visible change is in the Mail component. The Mail client, which is used for both reading mails and RSS feeds, now operates by default in a three-column mode and features automatic grouping and pinned messages. Check out our earlier coverage for more on the improved Mail client.

Tunny isn’t a game changer, but brings forth an impressive list of improvements. Opera made a smart call by not letting a single feature hold back numerous other promising enhancements. Wahoo or Opera 12 will still be the release to look out for. However, Tunny provides enough reasons to be a must update for existing Opera users.

[ Download Opera 11.60 ]

Ever since its launch, Google Chrome has been gaining market share at a steady rate. Now, StatsCounter is reporting that Google Chrome has finally managed to surpass Firefox globally. Chrome’s worldwide market share rose to 25.69%, while Firefox slipped to 25.23%. Microsoft Internet Explorer also continued its slide and fell to 40.63% at the end of November.

Google Chrome gained 21% over the past two years, while Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera lost 15.94%, 6.98, and 0.2% each. Safari also managed to gain 2.255 market share since November 2009. In India the figure are slightly different as Indian users have typically been more reactive to market changes than Americans. Only 26.9% Indians surf using Internet Explorer, while 34.29% and 34.75% rely on Firefox and Chrome respectively. Opera controls a shade above 2.5% of the market share in India.

Browser statistics tend to be wildly inaccurate and inconsistent. However, they are still good enough to gauge the market trend, and in this case the trend is clear. Google Chrome’s rise in popularity has been nothing short of spectacular. Introduced in late 2008, it has won the hearts of millions of web users with its focus on speed, security, and simplicity. Although Chrome is undoubtedly benefiting from Google’s deep pocket and wide reach, the Chrome team needs to be applauded for getting their priorities right. Within a short span of time Chrome has made its presence felt with its innovative drive and commitment to web standards.

Firefox on the other hand struggled to ship the ambitious Firefox 4 update, lost out in the browser speed wars, and seems to perennially lag behind Chrome. Many fans believe that Mozilla’s lack of vision is hurting Firefox, which was once the darling of the alternate browser crowd.

One of the least appreciated features of Opera is its mail component. Opera uses the mail component for both email communications and RSS feeds. While Opera’s mail component might not have all the bells and whistles of some of the stand-alone RSS feed readers or email clients, it is more than powerful enough for most users. Yesterday, Opera Software released a new snapshot of Opera 11.60 that introduces some pretty major improvements to Opera’s Mail client.

Opera now uses the three column mode, with the list on the left and message on the right, as the default mode. This mode is undoubtedly the best mode to read mail or feeds, especially on widescreen monitors. However, if you want to go back to the old display style, with list on top and message at the bottom, you can still do so by clicking on the wrench icon, which replaces the confusing View’ menu with a simple Settings’ menu.

Opera has also introduced automatic mail grouping, whereby messages are automatically clubbed together by date. You also have the option to group items by unread status, by pinned status, or not at all.

The stylesheet and icons for Mail have been redone. As a result, everything looks a lot cleaner, lighter, and fresher. Other changes include a new pinned messages feature and a couple of mail bug fixes.

You can download the latest Opera snapshot from the Desktop Team Blog. Since this is a snapshot, all the usual disclaimers apply. In fact, you need to be extra cautious while installing Opera Tunny builds, as they are not Opera Next releases and install over stable versions.

Opera Software has just released the first snapshot of Opera 11.60, codenamed Tunny. This release marks a departure from the Norwegian browser developer’s previously announced plans of following up Opera Swordfish (Opera 11.5) with Wahoo (Opera 12). According to the new roadmap, Opera will release Tunny within a few weeks, and will follow it up with Wahoo when it is ready. The prime reason for the new roadmap is that Opera’s hardware acceleration feature is still not ready for primetime. “Our ambitions for hardware acceleration are very high and we consider it more important to do it right, than to do it fast”, explained Opera’s Ruarí Ødegaard.

Opera 11.60 will aim to deliver all the features showcased in the first Opera 12 alpha, which was released last month. This includes a new HTML5 parser (Ragnarök), a new version of Carakan (JavaScript engine), full ECMAScript 5.1 support, CSS3 radial gradients, and a new featherweight address field with bookmark star menu. This snapshot also features support for HTML5 custom scheme and content handlers.

Unlike Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Opera doesn’t follow a rapid release cycle. Personally, I am not the biggest fan of the rapid release schedule. One of the arguments put forth by Mozilla in favor of the new fast paced release cycle is that it ensures that crucial features that are ready for mass consumption don’t get held up due to other unfinished enhancements. By being flexible about its release schedule, Opera is successfully tackling one of the potential disadvantages of a feature driven release cycle, while avoiding all the annoyances of a rapid release cycle.

Opera 11.60 snapshot can be downloaded from the Opera Desktop Team blog. Unlike other preview builds, the snapshot will not be available as an Opera Next download. It will overwrite the stable installation. Hence, it is reccomended that you backup your existing profile before installing this build. Opera has announced that it will continue publishing Opera 12 snapshots, which will be available as an Opera Next download.

The jury is still out on Google Plus; however, Google’s phenomenal reach coupled of a refreshing take on privacy has ensured that it is off to a promising start. If you are amongst the millions who have already jumped ship to Google Plus, here are three Opera extensions to enhance your Google Plus experience.

Google+ Injector: One of the best features of Google Plus is the notification bar, which allows you to track what’s happening on Google Plus and instantly respond to new events without leaving the current page. Unfortunately, Google was too lazy to develop a truly cross-browser solution, and the notification bar just doesn’t work in Opera. Fortunately, there is a simple extension called Google Plus Injector that adds the missing CSS, HTML, and JavaScript code into Google Plus to add the missing options to the web toolbar for Opera users.

The extension works as promised for Google Plus; however, it would have been even better, if it worked across different Google services (such as Google Search). Currently, even with this extension, notifications aren’t available on Google properties other than Google Plus.

DownloadSupport for Google+: Google Plus’ excellent media integration support has made it a popular platform to share images and videos. This extension enables one click download of images and videos from Google Plus. You can either use album and batch download for images, or selectively download images from your Google Plus stream. For YouTube videos shared on Google, one click download option is available.

Google+ Notif: This extension displays a snapshot of the latest Google Plus notifications on Opera’s speed dial. Google’s global web bar doesn’t function properly in Opera; however, this is a nice alternative to stay on top of activities in your Google Plus stream.

If you are an Opera user who can’t stay away from Google Plus, these three extensions are must haves. However, there are a couple of more Google Plus extensions for Opera, including the Simple Google Plus Access extension that provides quick access to the social networking website through the toolbar. Feel free to explore Opera’s extension gallery to discover more handy extensions.

Halloween is celebrated in many countries across the world. While many associate this holiday with ghosts, witches and goblins, a lot of us think it’s just a great time to get together and have fun. If you have a computer, tablet or smartphone, you might want to add something to it that helps you get into the fun Halloween mood. Below are some links to a few of our past Halloween articles and some new stuff as well.

Screensavers

If you enjoy using screensavers on your Mac or Windows computer, you’ll find a nice collection of Halloween screensavers at NewFreeScreenSavers. Here are some screenshots of these great free screensavers. You can download them on the Halloween page.

Phones

Get Ready For Halloween with Halloween Android Apps  - also with wallpapers, themes, and ringtones.

Halloween Theme for Nokia and Symbian Smartphones

Top 5 Halloween Apps For iPhone/iPad

Computer Wallpapers

Download High Quality Halloween Wallpapers – for the PC, Mac and Linux

High Quality Halloween Wallpapers For Your Desktop or Mac

25 Places to Get Creepy Halloween Wallpapers

Web Browsers

Halloween Personas for Firefox  (themes)

Phantom of the Opera: Special Edition Opera Browser for Halloween

Apps, Themes and Extensions for Google Chrome Browser

Even More …

We have even more stuff for you to look over. Just follow this link to a Halloween search of Techie-Buzz.

In the raging browser wars, features, security and stability are paramount to competing. Opera might want to get a serious handle on things with the next release they push.

There is a memory corruption bug that has been present in Opera 10, 11 and the pre-release of 12 on Windows XP SP3. The vulnerability exists within SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) layout handling. By nesting SVG functions within XML calls, an attacker is able to crash Opera. While crashing a browser might not seem like a huge deal to some, couple it with code injection and you have an exploit that can lead to complete remote code execution, and then it’s game over.

The exploit, which was discovered over a year ago, was reported to Opera but never fixed. Jose Vasquez, the original author, has published full details on the vulnerability as well as written and released a complete Metasploit module. Metasploit is a security framework for penetration testing, allowing a large number of security professional to collaborate on software and service vulnerabilities.

What might seem like a benign crash of your browser, might turn out to be an attacker positioning themselves to take control of your computer and network. Although it’s been previously broken, Jose also indicates it may be possible to bypass DEP, which is an active security feature provided by Microsoft,  specifically made to prevent unwanted code execution.

In an interview, Opera’s co-founder,  Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner indicated their number of users grew from 50 million in 2009 to over 150 million in just one year. There are a lot of users who are potentially vulnerable to exploitation of this bug. When Opera 11.51 was released, major security and minor stability issues were the reason for the update. If we consider that  this bug has been present since 10.50, disclosed to Opera over a year ago, and still left unfixed — many users may want to look at switching to the very popular Chrome  or Firefox 7  until Opera fixes this issue.

Earlier this week, Opera Software released the first alpha of Opera 12. The first preview build of Opera 12 Рcodenamed Wahoo, was released in July. However, the Norwegian browser maker had been saving the goodies for October. As expected, and earlier predicted by me, Wahoo introduces support for hardware acceleration and WebGL. It also includes the Ragnar̦k HTML5 engine that Opera had been working on for a year.

Opera is a late entrant as far as hardware acceleration and WebGL support are concerned. However, it laid the groundwork for hardware acceleration through its Vega graphics backend as far back as 2009. Vega enables Opera to use hardware acceleration for everything from displaying fonts and CSS animations to the user interface itself. Hardware acceleration on Opera should work on all modern hardware running Windows XP or newer, Mac, and Linux. Opera maintains a blacklist of old and buggy drivers that are known to cause trouble. In case, hardware acceleration doesn’t work, Opera will switch to the highly optimised Vega software acceleration mode. Open opera:gpu in Opera 12 to find out if it is using hardware acceleration. If the Vega backend is specified as software, then try updating your graphics drivers. Opera 12 also supports WebGL, which is based on a stripped down version of OpenGL. WebGL enables browsers to run graphics intensive 3D games and animations that redefine what browsers can do.

Like hardware acceleration, Ragnarök is also something that Opera had been working on for a long time. The biggest advantage of switching to a HTML5 parser is compatibility. “The HTML5 specification defines a set of parsing rules for all markup, whether valid or invalid,” explained Bruce Lawson in an earlier blogpost. “Once all browsers have HTML5 parsers, the same markup will produce the same DOM across all conforming browsers”.

Traditionally, Opera’s alpha builds introduce engine improvements, while the beta introduces the more user facing features. Wahoo maintains this tradition by updating Presto (Opera’s rendering engine) to 2.9.220 and adding support for CSS3 radial gradients, in addition to the features detailed above. There are only a couple of user-oriented new features. A new lightweight skinning system that is pretty much identical to Firefox Personas is now the preferred skinning technique for Opera, and the bookmark star found in Firefox and Chrome has found its way into Opera. Besides this, the interface has been tweaked slightly to make the Featherweight skin appear more native to the OS you are using.

You can download Opera 12 alpha from opera.com/next. As you might expect, the alpha build has some bugs, including a particularly annoying one that makes it incompatible with Aero Snap on Windows. However, since all preview builds belong to the Opera Next stream, installing Wahoo won’t overwrite your stable Opera installation.

Opera Software has published a minor update to the Swordfish (Opera 11.5x) trunk. As suggested by the version number, Opera 11.51 is an extremely minor bug fix update that is intended to fix some of the major security and stability issues.

Swordfish introduced Opera’s speed dial extensions, Featherweight skin, and password synchronization, along with a host of under the hood changes. Check out our full review for a lowdown on Opera 11.50. According to the changelog, Opera 11.51 fixes several common crashes reported using the crash reporter along with some small usability issues and other bugs. Two security issues have also been fixed. Opera has refused to divulge the details of one of the low-severity issues, possibly because it also affects other browsers. The other vulnerability could have been exploited to make unsecured web content appear secure. Also new to Opera 11.51 is Lion fullscreen support for Mac users. The full changelog is available here.

Work is already underway on the next major release of Opera, codenamed Wahoo. Although, Opera is keeping its cards close to its chest, it has been releasing Opera Next builds of Wahoo. Opera 12 is widely expected to introduce support for cross-platform GPU Acceleration and WebGL. Opera’s Ragnarök HTML5 parser might also sneak through. What are the new features that you would like to see in Opera 12? Don’t forget to let us know.

[ Download Opera 11.51 ]