Why it matters to you
Opera 47 is light on new features, but its improvements related to bookmarks, visual design, and security make it an essential install if this is your browser of choice.
This week saw the release of Opera 47, which was a little earlier than expected based on the browser’s typical six-week update cycle. In a blog post, Krystian Kolondra, the executive vice president of the company’s desktop division, laid out some of the changes that users can expect.
The biggest news is that it’s now possible to export bookmarks from the browser, which is handy if you’re testing out an alternative. The stable build of Opera gives users the option to take every single bookmark from the Speed Dial, bookmarks bar, and all other folders, and have them served up as a handy, portable HTML file.
The bookmarks pop-up that appears when users add a new item to the bookmarks bar or the Speed Dial has also been fixed in response to bug reports.
Opera 47 also brings some improvements to the browser’s visual design. The dark color scheme now tempers darker favicons with a dab of a lighter shade, in order to help them stand out against the rest of the user interface. Meanwhile, the light color scheme has received some color contrast improvements to make it as legible as possible.
Elsewhere, users can now select background loading of news to occur every three hours or six hours. The video pop-up player has also been adjusted for smoother playback, and there are specific tweaks to video for two operating systems; flickering images on YouTube should be fixed for Windows 7 Aero users, and the MacOS crowd should no longer suffer from issues with going to fullscreen while watching YouTube videos on auto-play.
Another user request addressed in Opera 47 is the larger capacity for the ‘recently closed’ tab in the tabs bar. Previously, only 10 recently closed tabs would be retained, but this has now been upgraded to a whopping 32.
Finally, there’s a minor but useful tweak to the browser’s security protections. Opera will warn users about certain ‘risky’ file types before instigating a download, and now the Shell Command File (.scf) has been added to the list.
Installation links for Windows, MacOS, and Linux are available now via the announcement blog post, alongside a full changelog for more details on what’s new.