Mac goes to 64-bits, with Opera developer 25 update

September 5th, 2014

Today’s release of Opera developer 25 includes some interesting changes for Mac. We’ve made the move to 64-bit and have also enabled H.264 video support. We would also like to ask for more feedback on our new Speed Dial, something many of you picked up on in our previous developer release.

As always, a complete list of changes can be found in the changelog.

Start page changes

We have recently begun experimenting with a fresh, new look for Speed Dial. Please try it out and let us know what you think.

The right time to switch Mac to 64-bit

We held off on switching Mac to 64-bit until the benefits outweighed the downsides. Today, we think we have reached that milestone. Some of the changes that allowed us to make the switch include:

New 64-bit only API possibilities, with the upcoming release of Yosemite
Speed and security improvements – find out more on the Chromium blog
H.264 video now enabled on Mac, to support the transition from plug-ins
No new bugs (we hope!) 🙂

Notes

H.264 video support is only available for Opera users on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) and above (WebM video continues to work for all users)
Like Apple themselves, we no longer support Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

If you do run an older version of Mac OS, remember that OS X 10.9 is a free upgrade for users currently on 10.6, 10.7 and 10.8.

Update: Sharing

If you have been waiting to try our new experimental bookmark sharing, now is your chance to do so. We have just made our sharing server live. If you want to try out bookmark sharing, enable the opera://flags/#bookmarks-sharing flag. Feel free to give us feedback below but remember this is still at very early stage. We will give you more information, in a later blog post.