First Opera 38 developer

April 4th, 2016

It’s gradually becoming a developer stream tradition that we share with you what’s up in our backyard, not only by giving you options to test our new features, but also by introducing you to mock-ups and drafts of our ongoing projects. As usual – please remember that this is developer build, so the changes introduced here may not make it to beta, or even at all.

You can also expect the unexpected 😉 Some surprises might be in store for O38, and potentially also in O37.

New personal news

Are you tired of browsing multiple portals and sites?
Imagine news that’s personalized and fit your needs – you decide what is shown. You can pick your favorite sites from the over 8,000 sources we offer. Your fresh news is instantly updated and always handy. New articles that appear are bigger to show you what’s important. You can browse from categories for content sources based in different countries. This can be really helpful for those of you who like traveling. If you’re interested in cricket, you won’t have to comb through all the sports articles. We’ll deliver only the stuff from your favourite website, based on the sources you’ve selected. You can choose the sources you trust. How does that sound?

This is more or less how we see it:

Custom ad-blocking list support

We want to pimp your ride with our built-in ad blocker. We’re considering giving you power users the possibility to load your own files in the block-list form. There’ll be an extra button in Preferences, where you can add/remove any extra block-list files you’d like to load.

Other changes

Besides these big changes, we’ also prepared a number of minor fixes and updates, including:

Prompt on risky downloads: we’ve had a few objections regarding the current implementation of the solution, but we decided to turn it on as it enhances user security, and this advantage prevails over minor nuisances.
The Windows x64 experimental installer is now fixed and should work correctly.
The middle-click action on the bookmarks bar folders is also fixed.
We’ve fixed a minor nuisance related to Google Hangouts not working without the proper plug-in.
The Bluejeans plug-in should now work seamlessly.
Last but not least: a few crashes should disappear since we’ve fixed the root causes.

All in all, we hope that you will enjoy this release. Please let us know what you think of these changes. Happy browsing!