A pioneer in browser tab management, Opera 11 beta has now launched a better way of organizing and viewing your tabs on your desktop and Android mobile phones, via tab stacking. Tab stacking lets you view your tabs in groups according to theme or specific site, and reduces the usual clutter on your screen.

The dedication of Opera towards tabbed browsing has been continuously evolving, and has progressed since it began in 1995, where we saw the multiple documents interface through Opera 1. Since then, several tab management features have been launched namely the pop-up blocker (1997), drag-and-drop tabs (2003), and the latest Opera 10 that has visual tabs opened side-by-side in 2009.

Vice President of Desktop Products of Opera, Jan Standal, stressed how the popularity of tabs triggered them to come up with this tab stacking feature. “Tabs are the most popular feature in browsers today. Because so many of us wrestle with tens or even hundreds of open tabs, we needed a way to simplify tab management. Just like stacking papers for future reference, stacking your tabs is an intuitive way to organize and collect your open Web pages.”

Stacking tabs via Opera 11 beta is easy. You just drag one tab on top of the other, and hover the mouse over a tab. This will cause the expansion of the visual preview, and allow for stacking to occur.

Aside from tabs, Opera 11 also launched extensions, browser add-ons that enhance the capabilities of Opera and mouse gestures, which provide an effortless and efficient way to manage Opera with a few simple mouse movements.

Tab management is becoming an area of interest for many browser developers as they seek to make browser management easier for end users. The effect of this browsing essential was seen with the Firefox 4 update in July,  improving their tab browsing to answer growing consumer demand and improve usability.

In other news, Skyfire has updated its Android and iPhone mobile browsers this week. Skyfire 3.0 for Android will bring in variety of social networking features, including deep integration with Facebook Connect. On the other hand, Skyfire 2.1 for iPhone, which was released in several countries, is expected to improve coverage for video sites and browsing experience.  These Skyfire updates are a successor of its big achievement in recent weeks, when it was approved for a Flash-supporting application on the iPhone.

The Oslo-based company  has been consistently and aggressively updating its Android browser as well, and was seen when they launched Opera Mobile Beta 10.1 early November. The most notable feature of this version is geolocation and pinch to zoom.