Opera 43 developer

November 7th, 2016

Hi,

The Opera 43 cycle has just started, and we’re working on some new stuff. They are not here yet, but looking through changelog, you can find some partial work already delivered.

PGO for Windows

In O42 we are delivering x64 version of Windows builds, which are slightly faster than x32 version.
In O43 we plan to deliver another set of performance improvements Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) – a Visual Studio compiler feature able to speed up the build.
When a compiler optimizes a program, there is a trade-off between the program size and the program speed. If we tried to maximize the speed of everything, our browser would be a 1-GB download, and as the result it would consume a lot of memory and become slow instead.
Traditionally a compiler can only see the source code, but with the PGO, you let the compiler “see” the program running. That way it “learns” which parts of the code are important and which parts are not so much important, and can optimize the important parts in a much more effective way.

Address bar speculative prerenderer

When you type something in the address bar, the browser uses the previous behaviour to predict which web site you intend to load. If it finds a match, it will start loading that website in the background. Previous behaviour means all previous address bar inputs which led to loading a specific web site. So if you start the browser typing “nyt.com” every time, it will eventually learn that and load New York Times in the background. Also when you search for something, it will load the results likely to be clicked, in the background.
Effectively, your websites load speed should be improved.

Native chromecast support

We’re working on the built-in chromecast support as opposed to using external extensions for that. So, installing the Google Cast extension from the store won’t be needed anymore. You can already test it via #media-router flag

O12 like links selection

We want to bring back the O12 link selection:

horizontal mouse movements: select text
vertical mouse movements: drag link

Bookmarks export

Finally – a function that many of you requested for a long time. The bookmark export, when it is ready, will allow you to save all of your bookmarked pages to an .html file. To do so, click the ‘Export Bookmarks’ label found under the Bookmarks menu, and then choose the name and destination for your exported bookmarks file.