Opera 22 moves on to Next, bringing new themes and seamless updates

May 9th, 2014

Today Opera 22 moves from Developer to the Next channel. This follows more than a month of hard work ironing out issues to bring 22 up to beta quality.

Silent, smaller updates

On Windows our new silent update allows for a more seamless update to the latest version. There are no buttons to click and no UAC (User Account Control) dialog interrupting your workflow. You will be automatically updated to ensure you always have the most recent and most secure Opera version.

The first two updates from Opera Next 21 to Opera Next 22 will still show the UAC but from this point onwards it will be a thing of the past!

In addition to removing this distracting dialog the autoupdate packages will now be sent to you in the form of a patch instead of a full package, whenever possible, which means that updating Opera uses even less bandwidth. In you want to read more about these technologies and how they work, read Julien’s developer blog post.

Mac users needn’t feel left behind. In fact Mac might be left wondering what this mysterious update authentication dialog because Mac already updates silently. With regards to the smaller, patch updates, this time we will assess it with Windows first.

New Themes

A fresh new Opera deserves a fresh new look and so we have updated our pre-installed themes. You can switch between the new themes from the “Opera Menu → Themes” on Windows and “View → Show Themes” on Mac.

We spent some time selecting the new themes that compliment the Opera UI beautifully. However if you would like an even bigger selection, drop by the Themes section of the Opera add-ons site. Remember that you can also set any image you find online as a theme, simply by right clicking on it and selecting “Use Image as Theme”.

Let the testing begin!

With the move to the Next stream our stabilisation efforts are already well underway. However we will now take it up a notch with your help. Please mention any new issues you see. We are particularly interested in regressions for working behaviour in Opera 21 stable.