There is a lot of uncertainty right now about the impact of the hardware security issue named Meltdown. There will be a scheduled release of Opera which will contain a first set of workarounds as soon as the browser is properly tested and ready for release. This will most likely be at the end of January. To improve the protection it is already possible to turn on something called Strict site isolation. This separates sites into different processes which makes it harder to exploit the hardware problem.

Strict site isolation is an upcoming security feature that is still being tested. There is more information on the project page, including a list of what remains to do in the project. To turn on Strict site isolation, a user can visit opera://flags/?search=enable-site-per-process and click “Enable”.

We recommend all users to install all available operating system patches as soon as possible since this is not a problem that can be handled fully at the application level.

There is more information in the Chromium project, where Opera is developing our browser engine together with other browser vendors. See:

1. https://www.chromium.org/Home/chromium-security/ssca
2. https://support.google.com/chrome/a/answer/7581529

Update:
On 2018-01-22 Opera 50 was updated with security patches.

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