Opera developer 41.0.2340.0 update

September 5th, 2016

Hello,

After a break without a developer release last week, today we are delivering to you for testing few new features.

Faster startup

Starting the browser should be very fast. However, until now, if you had many tabs open last session, the browser would start loading all of them at the same time. This could mean slowing down the browser. With Opera 41 we’re working on optimizing browser startup time with the most recent active tab and pinned tabs being prioritized for startup, while background tabs will be loaded with decreased priority. We are working on benchmarks results, to be shared soon. Meanwhile, let us know whether you can feel the snappy startup!

Battery saving improvements

When using battery saving mode, Opera now detects which video codec can be hardware accelerated and tries to choose that codec when doing video conferencing via WebRTC (this includes services such as Google Hangouts). This should save a lot of CPU and battery for our laptop-using video-conferencing hobnobbers out there! And even if Opera can’t find a hardware-accelerated codec, it’ll now also try to limit the pixel count when in battery saving mode to reduce CPU usage if possible.

The test has been made on a MacBook Air 6,2 (Intel Core i7 1.7GHz) running OS X 10.11, running one side of a video conference on AppRTC from full battery (100%) until the battery has been fully drained.

Hardware acceleration for Video Popout

Video popup so far has been handled by the software, which translated into extensive CPU usage. On low end devices that could lead into general system slowdown.
Now we are introducing hardware acceleration support for Video Popout. This should greatly limit the need for CPU support and free your PC resources to other things, while you watch your favorites movies.

Sync enhancements

We are rolling out some security enhancements, and we will share more details in the future. For now be advised that if you use passphrase, you will be able sync only between latest desktop clients (Opera Desktop 41).

Personal news updates

There are multiple changes in personal news, here are the most visible ones:

Onboarding redesigned and aligned with catalog.
Added history navigation, now you can go back to previous view.
Due to limited interest, News on SD removed.
More web feed related fixes, including image loading.
Search got even more powerful: No need to include http:// prefix when entering site’s name.
More feeds found during discovery process

To discover more take personal news for a test drive or check changelog.

Known issues

Autoupdate for Windows USB standalone installations does not work. To update these, please download and install the package manually.
We are not releasing Windows 64-bit builds.
It is not possible to enable VPN with a clean profile. It is being tracked as DNA-56872 and we are working on a reliable solution.
With #media-detachable-view-hwaccelerated enabled, closing the popout and selecting a new movie makes the popout open again.
Speed dial extensions are not added on Windows

Please check out full changelog for details.