Opera the uber famous browser on the days of Symbian (read Belle), has released its new iteration named Opera 15. Lately it was strugling in spite of having a fulliy featured mail client in-built, and more usefull in contries like India, the Turbo mode, which uses server side compressing techniques to offload the bandwidth a little for the user.
Few months ago Opera talked about Opera ICE and they said they’ll ditch their presto engine and go with the WebKit engine which is already used by the like of Apple’s Safari and Google’s modified version of the Chromium browser, the Google Chrome.
And yesterday they finally revealed that via their official blog, as its tradition, you can always get the next version under development from http://www.opera.com/next . The new version is named 15 in order to get along with its Android version number 14 so that when releasing it publically both will cary the same name Opera 15.
Few months ago Opera talked about Opera ICE and they said they’ll ditch their presto engine and go with the WebKit engine which is already used by the like of Apple’s Safari and Google’s modified version of the Chromium browser, the Google Chrome.
And yesterday they finally revealed that via their official blog, as its tradition, you can always get the next version under development from http://www.opera.com/next . The new version is named 15 in order to get along with its Android version number 14 so that when releasing it publically both will cary the same name Opera 15.
What’s new in Opera 15:
- WebKit rendering engine is adapted in the place of the old Presto engine
- opera://config has been removed, opera://config now just leads to the settings page which is minimal, if you’re a power user. Not much of a place to customise as per our needs or to play around
- SPDY protocol has been enabled by default
- New start screen, with Speed dials as found in the previous iterations of Opera.
- Stash, a feature more like a bookmark, but its intension is diferent, it suggest that it can be used to remember very very special stuffs and to recollect them just with a single click of the mouse.
- Discover, which as the name suggest, gives you articles based upon various catogeries and region, which you can select as your interests
- Now the url bar is also the search bar, with Google, Bing, Amazon and Wikipedia as search providers
- Turbo mode has been changed to Off Road mode, ad you just get to On or Off it, no setting it to Off, On or Automatic like we can do it in older Opera’s
What i miss, as off now:
- Buffer extension is currently not supported. But since Chrome has one, we can expect it to venture into Opera soon. (update: It is coming soon)
- There is a very limited number of themes right now, and it also lacks a black/dark background theme
- Bookmarks are not properly implemented
Regarding the speeds, it was able to open multiple tabs on a old Pentium IV single core machine like “hey bro, that’s all you got? I thought you’re a power user, y u no give me some real challenge :P:. It was faster than i imagined it to be, annd all thanks to the blistering fast Web Kit rendering engine.
Opera is rumormed to use the currently under development, or more aptly under optimization, Blink renderin engine which will be housed under a Google Chrome browser near you, soon.
And now i wonder, what will Firefox & Internert Explorer do, cause literally all the other browsers moved to web Kit as thier core, that puts the future of the web browsers, a mystery to wait and watch.
And users who where afraid of Google’s tracking of usage for targeted ads and refused to use Web Kit based Chrome, can now use this, as both are quite same by heart.
Karthikeyan 