It’s built on the same Chromium architecture as those and shares the minimalist design philosophy, hiding most of its functions away in menus to keep a clean look, with maximum screen real estate devoted to the web page you’re. It’s now starting to feel like a genuine alternative to the better-known browsers out there. On the surface, Opera looks entirely familiar if you’ve used any other popular web browsers like Chrome or Microsoft Edge recently. Opera is still a work in progress, but it’s come a long way in the 15 months since we reviewed the first release of this new reboot. Also look out for Tab Previews (simply roll your mouse over any tab for a pop-up preview of its contents, which are dynamically updated along with the page itself). It’s designed primarily for slower networks but will work on any network you choose. Other handy features include Opera Turbo – technology also found on its mobile browser that compresses data while you browse to speed up website loading. It’s very flashy, but the key thing is it’s logical, and it works. The information below describes version history for Opera browsers built using the WebKit/Chromium. What was stored in the now-defunct Stash can be found here. This document provides a quick historical reference to Opera versions, release dates, release streams, rendering engines, JavaScript engine, user agent/ID strings formats, features, and improvements. Operas Speed Dial (new tab page) has the ability to hold as many websites as you want, and you can customize it almost however you want. Full of useful extensions, Opera also supports extra APIs like Speed Dial API, Extension Sidebar API and Stash API meaning wider variety of extension possibilities than in Chrome. The Discover tab can be customised to show you news and updates from a variety of topics focused on your chosen location.Īnd finally, the restored bookmarks can be displayed as a list or as a grid containing thumbnail preview images (or site icon). Opera Addons site keeps quality up compared to Chrome Store. The redesigned Start page gives you a choice of three views: Speed Dial lets you place key favourites front and centre via a series of tiles, which includes the ability to group related sites together. This left Opera room to focus more on the user interface, and while it’s taken a while to get all the key functionality back, Opera is now starting to fire on all cylinders, particularly now bookmark support has been restored after various failed attempts to move to a different way of storing favourites. The reboot was prompted by Opera’s decision to abandon its own proprietary web rendering engine (Presto) in favour of Google’s open-source Chromium engine. Even now, some aren’t coming back – specifically Opera’s old built-in mail client, which is available on its own as Opera Mail. Rebooted in June 2013 as a Chromium-based variant, the new Opera’s early history was a troubled one, with many long-established features absent.

It may not enjoy the same level of attention as other heavyweight web browsers, but there’s still a lot to like about Opera.

What is opera stable