It has been a long time since my last blog entry. I could find nothing to write about (or maybe think about). Now, that Opera has finally incorporated Web-kit (that is; in simple terms; engine being used Chrome) and are probably moving to be open source, I definitely found something.
It was released publicly on Opera Blogs by the team about the release of Opera Next 15. I was shocked to notice the largest file size of Opera's installer with a size increasing 20 MB (24 MB, tbh). While normally these are kept generally below 15 MB for international release.
After a busy Winter here in the Desktop department at Opera we are finally ready to lift the covers of the latest preview of the next generation of our Web browsers. Today we are releasing Opera Next 15 for Windows and Mac.Though a Linux release is not yet out, it has been mentioned in comments that "We’re not releasing a Linux version today. It is an important market for us, and we are still working on it."
Thank you Opera team for this new UI and other changes in your release. This release is based on Chromium/Blink. So far, I have liked what I noticed in the browser. The UserAgent string for this browser is:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/28.0.1500.20 Safari/537.36 OPR/15.0.1147.18 (Edition Next)Along with that, here is a concise list of features I noticed:
- Really fast management and transfers in tabs
- Stash
- Discover
- Speed dial includes bookmarks
- Off road mode
- Any page can be added directly to speed-dial by one click
- Better displaying of tabs (as compared to older releases)
- Opera's internal email client M2 is a separate product
- A completely new and quite improved help index
- The settings page is a copy of Google's Chrome browser
- Go to Speed Dial button available near address bar
- Speed Dial can also manage folders/directories
- Chrome's web inspector
- n-different "opera.exe" entries in the Task Manager
And that is about it. I couldn't find a single feature change that I could either care about or comprehend. But, on the other hand, since it is just the "FIRST" release with these changes, Opera is sure to implement many of the features. The list of unavailable features is quite long but the most important to me amongst them include:
- Mouse Gestures
- Tab stacking
- Dragonfly
- Panels (Press F4 in older Opera browsers if you are unaware of what they are) - This includes chat client, contact manager, mail client, notes etc.
- RSS Feeds parser (No, XML parser just doesn't cut it for me)
- Custom shortcuts (such as Ctrl + Shift + V for Paste and Go )
- Old password manager
- Search engine management
- Closed tab list in the title bar
- Option to add Status bar/View bar
- Sessions Manager
The above list is just what I'd like back in beta release of Opera. All the very best Opera team. Thanks a lot for the awesome user experiences as always. At the end, I'd just quote a comment from the aforementioned blog post.
If I wanted an UI for idiots I would use an browser with such UI! I've installed OperaNext and... well, I see chrome... and simply cant use it!
