Chromium-based Opera 15 launched, brings loads of new features

Opera Software has released the newest version of its browser for Windows and Mac. The version number has been bumped up to 15 from the previous desktop version, which was 12. This update marks Opera’s shift from the WebKit rendering engine to the Chromium project’s Blink engine. 

Opera had announced back in February that it would be ditching its own Presto engine for WebKit, but later followed Google and adopted Blink after the search giant said it would build its own engine. Opera had said at the time that the shift was due to its commitment to stick with Chromium.

Opera gets new engine, loads of cool features

This shift makes Opera look and behave a lot like the Chromium browser, as it basically uses the same engine. The address bar can be used to search for stuff directly, much like Chromium’s omnibox, and the Google search box on the top right has been done away with. 

The Speed Dial page has also been refreshed to let you organise shortcuts to web pages in folders. You can even filter your shortcuts by folder, which we think is a great feature to have if you’re the type to have lots of shortcuts to websites. 

What’s more, the browser also has the same “Discover” tab that can be found on the new Android version of the browser. It’s like a news feed and shows you content from a variety of sources based on your location and some categories such as news, food and entertainment. You can add or remove categories from a list and customise exactly what Opera recommends.

Also new is a “Stash” feature that lets you stick complete websites to a tab by clicking a heart icon in the address bar. You can “stash” previews of multiple web pages for later reference and then view all your stashed pages together. The Stash tab lets you zoom in and out of the previews, but you can’t rearrange them. Clicking on a preview will load the full webpage.

This release also marks Opera’s shift to a rapid release cycle, much like Chromium. There will be three different release channels you can opt for: Opera (Stable) will be updated every couple of weeks and will be the most stable release; Opera Next will be updated more frequently than the stable channel and will have most of the features you can expect in future versions, but will have some bugs; and Opera Developer will be the latest build of the browser—it’ll be quite a little buggy though.

Opera is not asking users on the 12.x version of the browser to upgrade to Opera 15 right away. The company will continue to issue updates and security patches for Opera 12.x for some time.