Opera 12 debuts with new customization options, smart features

If you’re the type of person who spends most of your days in front of a web browser, Opera Software thinks you will appreciate its makeover. Opera 12, the newest release from the developers at Opera Software, debuts with everything you need for a complete browser transformation.

The free software downloads comes with themes, an easy way to customize the look of your browser. The company is making hundreds of themes available, and more added each day.

The new browser also allow developers to create applications that make use of your webcam. Applications such as Photo Booth, Polaroid, FaceKat try to make it more fun to use the browser as a platform for entertainment and games.

Opera 12 comes with new security badges to make it easier to understand the security and privacy policies of the sites you visit. You can quickly see if a site is using your location information or wants to turn on your webcam.

Opera 12 comes with more than just these features. Numerous other tweaks, including a speed boost are part of this release. The company says users can expect faster page loading, faster start up and faster HTML5 rendering over its predecessor. 64-bit support on Windows and Mac gives better performance on more advanced machines. Opera is also introducing an experimental hardware graphics acceleration.

On top of performance, Opera also improved resiliency, by running plug-ins in their own processes. This means if one plug-in crashes, Opera keeps running without affecting other tabs.

Opera 12 now comes in 60 total languages, with added support for right-to-left text and five new languages: Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Urdu and Kazakh.