Opera 17 - First developer stream preview


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Opera 17 - First developer stream preview

 

As the summer continues, our offices have the best airconditioners in Norway and Poland, so our developers have been in them, working to bring you Opera 17 Developer stream. This stream is our bleeding edge development; features will be piloted, and may be shelved, taken back to the drawing board, or taken forward to the Opera Next stream - feature complete, but potentially buggy. Once the bugs have been ironed out, the features are released as stable, and once every few weeks the streams are all refreshed. You can follow all three if you want, but please note that you shouldn't entrust valuable data to anything other than the released stable stream. 
 

Downloads

 

So, what's new in Opera 17 Developer? Amongst the others, we have prioritized some of the things you have been asking for.

  • Start up mode option - yes, more options! You can pick one of: last session, speed dial, set of pages
  • Pinned tabs - a nice beginning of future tabs improvements.
  • Rocker gestures - (left->right click, right->left click)
  • Extension APIs - more API stuff to play with: bookmarks, commands, omnibox, webNavigation. Separated article with detailed API's explanation will be shipped later.
  • Search engine manager - On top of the current shortcuts to search in the addressbar, (enter the one character shortcut plus your shortcut: "b" for Bing, "g" for google) you can now customize your searches, so go ahead and add "d" for duckduckgo, "m" for your own site, "o" for Opera desktop team blog, or anything else!

Full changelog

 

Candidate features near ready for O17 (currently turned off in opera:flags)

 

  • Themes - you can now download themes for Opera. These are backwards compatible, so themes that worked in Opera 12 will work in Opera 17 Developer.
  • Camera/mic - we've re-plumbed the web cam and microphone, so your getUserMedia fun is reinstated! This is not working on Mac correctly yet, but feel free to check it out on Windows.
  • HiDPI Support (Windows) - for the ones running in hi-resolution on small screens, we are delivering you better pixels experience.

Coming soon

 

As summer turns to autumn, we'll turn our attention to improved tabs handling: vertical tabs, visual tabs, tab cycler, move tabs between windows, quick access bar (aka bookmarks bar), synchronization.. We've planned further bookmarks enhancements, further synchronization development, site preferences, and more. (Hint: so please don't fill up the comments asking when they'll be released - the answer, as always, is "when they're ready". Like autumn berries, they need to be ripe before they're picked. 

Note that in this version we present more changes than in O16. Yet till O18 hits next stream, you should be able to see even more changes included. As the vacation time is getting over, the rapid development cycle becomes really rapid.

Happy testing!

 

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

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Some great changes in here (Y) Can choose how the browser starts up and bookmarks are back. After god knows how long I can finally use Xmarks with Opera. Until they get a bookmarks bar in the UI, I'm using the Minimal Bookmarks Tree extension from the Chrome web store.

This already has replaced Chrome as my everyday browser. It's strangely nice to use even in its current state.

 

One annoying bug: Recently closed tabs is broken in this build.

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Some great changes in here (Y) Can choose how the browser starts up and bookmarks are back. After god knows how long I can finally use Xmarks with Opera. Until they get a bookmarks bar in the UI, I'm using the Minimal Bookmarks Tree extension from the Chrome web store.

This already has replaced Chrome as my everyday browser. It's strangely nice to use even in its current state.

 

One annoying bug: Recently closed tabs is broken in this build.

I can't find the bookmarks?

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I can't find the bookmarks?

 

They're not exposed in the UI, but the APIs for bookmarks is there. If you search up a bookmarks extension from the Chrome store and install it in Opera, you'll see what I mean ;)

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They're not exposed in the UI, but the APIs for bookmarks is there. If you search up a bookmarks extension from the Chrome store and install it in Opera, you'll see what I mean ;)

 

Oh right yeah I know the API is there just wondered if the build had been updated already :p

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Does not opera:flags has initial bookmark support???

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They're not exposed in the UI, but the APIs for bookmarks is there. If you search up a bookmarks extension from the Chrome store and install it in Opera, you'll see what I mean ;)

Opera already have (crappy) bookmark extension without the need of install Chrome extension, if Chrome one is the same piece of ######, no thx.

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Opera already have (crappy) bookmark extension without the need of install Chrome extension, if Chrome one is the same piece of ****, no thx.

 

It's not. The current Opera bookmark extension does little more than import bookmarks into a HTML file. It doesn't make them available to other extensions or the browser itself.

 

The bookmark extensions on the other hand use the bookmark APIs and so when Opera throws in a bookmark bar and bookmarks manager into the UI, the bookmarks across that bar, the manager, the extensions, etc. will all be the same. Hence why I mentioned Xmarks - Xmarks works unmodified in Opera, as it's the same bookmarks API as Chrome.

 

For now, those extensions won't be too useful in Opera if you don't use Xmarks or equivalent since you can't easily edit or add to your bookmarks.

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  • 2 months later...

I haven't really tried this new version of opera yet. Just downloaded opera 17 stable to play with. Its still missing a few important features (opera link still doesn't work, can't tear tab off into a new window, meh bookmarks system), but they seem to be making progress (there's a flag not to allow tearing off tags into a new window, and there's now a full featured bookmarks backend, but they haven't yet added a full frontend).

 

the one thing I really like is IMO it looks much more native than firefox or chrome in windows 8:

 

post-159052-0-13204400-1381679195.png

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I downloaded the current dev build of Opera 18 on OS X. It looks native-ish:

 

Screen-Shot-2013-10-13-at-17.52.23.png

As a comparison: this is Chrome 32 dev on OS X:

 

Screen-Shot-2013-10-13-at-17.54.43.png

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