First release on Opera Developer Channel


    As we wrote earlier , Opera switches to an accelerated release cycle, consisting of three channels: Opera, Opera Next and Opera Developer. If the first two channels are already with you, then we held the third, the most experimental one, until a lot of interesting things accumulated in it. So, meet: Opera Developer for Mac and  Windows .

    If you are developing sites or extensions, we recommend that you install this assembly of Opera Developer: it will be updated frequently and will become the place where new browser capabilities and web technologies will appear, which, as a result, will come in stable versions of the Opera browser.

    What is the difference between Opera Next and Opera Developer? Next demonstrates the features that will appear in the next stable version, and Developer is the place for experiments that will go into Next and go further, or perhaps remain experimental.

    Not to be unfounded, here are some differences between the current versions of Opera Next and Opera Developer ...

    • The current version of Opera Next is 16.0.1196.29 and it runs on Chromium 29, Opera Developer has version 17.0.1224.1 and runs on Chromium 30.
    • In this version of Opera Developer, we returned some features from Opera 12: pinning tabs and gestures with the mouse button pressed (do not forget to enable gestures in the settings).
    • New APIs were added for extensions: bookmarks, commands, address bar, webNavigation - documentation for them to work.
    • For the first time, the “At Startup” block appeared in the settings, where you can choose what Opera will do: continue from the previous place, open the start page or open a group of pages that can be set additionally.
    • Now you can create your own search providers and set keywords for them

    Also in the experimental section opera:flagsthere were some features from Chromium and some of ours only:

    • Media features, that is, microphone and video support that you can check on  Web Audio Playground or Webcam Toy .
    • Context menus for extensions, which add a drop-down menu for extension buttons, which allows you to hide a button or quickly remove an extension.
    • Lazy session loading will allow you to quickly launch a browser with several tabs, of which only the active one will load, and the rest will wait for their moment.
    • Support for themes allows you to install light themes from  the extension catalog , as it was in Opera 12. But this is only the beginning, we plan to expand the format so that it is possible to put separate images for different system tabs, such as settings, express panels and downloads.
    • HiDPI mode is now supported on Windows

    Well, how do you like it?

    PS: Recall that now in work: vertical tabs, tab thumbnails, a list of tabs for switching, moving tabs between windows, a quick access bar (formerly known as a bookmark bar), synchronization, settings for sites and much more. When is% THIS% ready? When we finish this, but the trend is good, you see for yourself.

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