Opera Unveils Opera Desktop 11.50 with Speed Dial Extension

Opera today announce the availability of the latest version of Opera Desktop, 11.50 with Speed Dial Extension as the main feature. Up until now, there are already more than 500,000 downloads counted, beating the number of Opera fans on their Facebook Pages (precisely 461,049 fans) in just 2 hours and 12 minutes. Opera targets to have like more than 100 million users for all categories, Desktop, Mini and Mobile, in 2013. Opera Desktop has around 2-3% of total desktop browser market share, while their Mini and Mobile counterparts have far better share in mobile browser realm.

There will be 50 extensions pre-loaded into the browser, with developers able to create their owns in very easy way. Those willing to create extension can look at http://dev.opera.com for further information. Regarding Speed Dial extension, Jan Standal, VP of Desktop Products, Opera Software, in the press release said, "The good news is, no matter what browser you choose, you'll get something like this--eventually. The question is how long do you want to wait? With Opera, you can experience Speed Dial extensions along with our other pioneering features today."

Other than Speed Dial extension, Opera Desktop 11.50 unleashes some other features, including Read It Later's Speed Dial extension, Webdoc, The Hype Machine, Password Synchronization, sleeker new design, thousands of bugs fix and more advanced support of HTML5. All packed into one advanced browser.

We had a chance to have conference call with Arnstein Teigene, Product Manager Desktop Add-ons, Opera Software, about the release. He said that for now, Speed Dial extension is only for Opera Desktop and not for more popular Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. He can't comment on further development of other products, but of course it may be implemented for mobile browsers in the future.

Regarding the process of creating extension by third party developers, Arnstein said there's moderation process in place, but Opera is trying much to help developers getting through this process. There have been several extensions made by local developers and he said the response is very good. Furthermore, Opera supports web standards, thus Arnie urges that it's very easy for developers to create their own extension.

Anyway, here's the promotional video: