From: i luffs yeww
I honestly can't find anywhere reliable (YouTube comments are not a reliable source) showing any lightsaber designs similar to what's shown in the trailer. Even if it has existed before (I hope it has, honestly - my biggest gripe with sci-fi is that the technological progressions never make sense. Why are humans flying space ships that fire lasers into space like it's no big deal? Those lasers don't decelerate, and they'll hit something eventually. It would be mayhem. We hardly let people fly or shoot things these days, especially not for anything important like missile defense or the like), I can't say it's "common." I doubt everyone on the internet other than YouTube commenters missed out on that aspect of Star Wars.
In the link you gave me about light-saber resistant materials, further down describes that lightsaber and some wielders of it I believe (I read a lot of that page out of curiosity).
As for shooting lasers into space, they dissipate after a while, haven't you ever played any Star Wars game? In reality though, as they move at the speed of light, you'd never really see them shoot like they do, and more importantly, they actually would dissipate. Between hitting microscopic dust filtered throughout space slowly taking away it's heat and power, it would also slowly flare out. No matter how hard you want a light-based shot to be a simple line, it will only possibly become a thinner cone. It will eventually flare out to a perfectly safe width. For an Earth based example, it would be pretty much impossible to shoot the moon with a laser of power, no matter how powerful it is, as even incredibly precise and thin lasers would become kilometers in diameter by the time they got even that far.