![]() ![]() For now, it looks a lot like Chrome without any killer feature to make everyone switch. But it will need more work to become a serious contender against Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Opera 15 is a first step in the right direction. You can’t customize your search engines, you can’t use a bookmark bar, etc. The browser settings don’t sync with other Opera browsers (or at least not yet). Instead, users should rely on the new speed dial, which now supports folders. For example, Opera 15 doesn’t have a “Bookmarks” menu. Switching from Chrome to Opera should be painless.īut regular users expect a minimum set of features for their browser. If you don’t see this option, there isn’t a problem application. ![]() Click Reset and clean up Update or remove incompatible applications. ![]() Opera took the opportunity to rethink every feature in Opera’s history, making the browser a lot easier for new users. Some apps might stop Chrome from working properly. And power user features, such as Opera Unite and mouse gestures, made Opera too complicated to the average user. You’ve saved all of the tabs from a workspace into a Speed Dial folder. In the Edit popup, give the folder a new name and click OK. In the age of webmails and smartphones, carrying over an email client and a widget engine made sense in 2005 and maybe 2006, but not in 2013. Editing the newly-added Speed Dial folder. Widgets, notes, Opera Unite’s local webserver feature are all gone. The development team left many cumbersome features behind as well. Overall, using Opera for basic browsing is great. Tabs are slimmer, the address and search bars are now unified, the fixed status bar is gone. The browser sports a long-anticipated new design that works a lot better. Opera Turbo is still there, but it’s now called the off-road mode. There are a couple of new features, a Discover tab very reminiscent of Google News with a Pinterest UI, a Stash tab that works like Safari’s “Reading List”. Yet, this new release feels half-baked - the new design works well, the company finally got rid of obsolete features, but many essential features are still missing. There is an entire Wikipedia page dedicated to Opera’s features. For example, the speed dial first appeared in 2007 before popping up in other browsers. Opera often brags about its innovative features that the company introduced years before Microsoft, Google, Mozilla and Apple. Opera is back, but why would I use it over Chrome? While this strategic move was needed to keep up with the competition, the company has to give its users incentives to actually use the new version. Users subscribe to a release channel (Opera, Opera Next or Opera Developer) and can now expect a release every few weeks. Gone are the days of rendering issues on websites that weren’t optimized for Opera’s engine.Įven the release cycle is now very similar to Chrome’s release cycle. Under the hood, you will find Blink - Google’s rendering engine based on WebKit - as well as V8, the JavaScript engine in Chrome. The company hopes to compete on features to attract new users - but it’s not there yet. Now based on the Chromium project, Opera 15 shares a lot of similarities with Google Chrome. After a month of testing, Opera’s radically new browser exits beta stage and is now available to download on. ![]()
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