Opera 11 beta brings "tab stacking," on-demand plug-ins, more

So far with the Opera 11 snapshots, the focus has been on speed, extension support, and some pretty major UI work on the email client. There's been plenty of additional activity behind the scenes, however, and with the arrival of the Opera 11 beta today you can now play with one more feature: tab stacking.

What is it? It's a way to keep your browser tabs organized, and it's going to be very handy for those of you who tend to accumulate tabs like 8-year-olds accumulate Pokemon cards. Maybe you have 8 tabs open which are all related to a new motherboard you're buying -- just drag and drop them onto a single tab, and Opera automatically creates a stack for you. You can see the tiny arrow pointing to the right on my screenshot. Click the arrow, and your tabs slide out. Hover over a stack and Opera 11 shows you thumbnails for each tab inside it. [Firefox Panorama, eat your heart out -Ed]

Opera's shared a demonstration video which shows you tab stacking in action -- check it out after the break!

There's more to like about the new beta, of course. There's now an option to load plug-ins on demand, the address bar has been re-touched to make security information more visible, and Opera's mouse gestures have been improved. It's got extensions, too -- and we recently ran down 10 particularly handy ones.

Download Opera 11 Beta

Tags: browser, browsers, opera 11, opera 11 beta, Opera11, Opera11Beta, web