Opera 15 is released today, it is the first version of Opera to be based on Chromium. For your information Chromium is an open-source browser developed by Google, based on Chrome OS and having almost all the features of Chrome. By adopting Chromium, Opera becomes faster and more compatible with HTML5 websites and applications. The new version offers many new features including Google’s new Blink rendering engine, discover feature and a customized Speed Dial. This stable version of all-new Opera 15 is available for both Windows and Mac.
What is new in Opera 15:
Opera 15 includes some interesting features like Discover, this feature will bring you new content with just one click. You are able to add pages which you want to keep to your Store and create a list of any web content you want to compare or come back to later. Discover gives top-quality news and entertainment from around the world. To make your searching easy and straightforward it combines the address and search bar together. The optimized Speed Dial helps you to group your entries in folders, so you can filter them effortlessly. It also groups your top-visited sites directly on a custom start page. As Opera 15 uses Chromium backend instead of Presto, it is compatible with Chromium extensions. Lastly, it offers a completely new User Interface which is deeply integrated with the platform.
Drawbacks of Opera 15:
Though the new version offers a custom User Interface, the interface can’t be customized. The user is not able to edit the built-in search engines, many widgets and unite are gone from the browser, and sync doesn’t work so far. Opera 15 no longer integrates with Opera Mail. Opera Mail is now a separet application, but when installed it will automatically detect and import all the details from the old Opera 12 profile. It is expected that Opera 15 will be available for Linux, but there is no download for Linux.
For the users who already have Opera 15 preview on their computer, they may not notice any big difference, except the new welcome page which highlights the new features of Opera 15.