opera Support for Opera Unite and Opera Widgets to end

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

Increased focus on Opera extensions and ending support for Unite applications and Widgets

Today we are announcing the beginning of the end for two of our current Add-on platforms. Starting with the upcoming Opera 12 release, Opera Unite and Opera Widgets will be turned off by default for new users. The two Add-on platforms will be completely removed in a later release expected before the end of this year.

Over the last six years we have learned a lot from our work on Opera Widgets and Opera Unite, and when we later built the extension platform for Opera 11 we benefited significantly from this experience. Our extension technology has been a great success, with millions of monthly downloads, and so far completely dwarfing the other platforms. Recently, Opera also shipped a labs version with extension support in Opera Mobile, investigating a fully cross-platform extension environment.

Moving forward we want to focus on one high quality Add-on platform across our products, rather than spending resources on maintaining legacy systems. The know how and and technologies from Unite and Widgets are already being reused in other Opera products. An example is the recently announced UPnP support in Opera Dragonfly.

To provide your feedback about use cases for Opera Unite or Opera Widgets you want to transfer other Opera products, please visit to our forum.

Source: Opera Add-ons blog

[Growled Member]

In my time with Opera I don't think I ever used Unite or Widgets.

[HighwayGlider]

Except screen ruler which was of great use to me and spirograph which was fun. Unite is another story, never used them nor found any use for them.