Software update: Opera 15.0.1147.130

Opera announced earlier this year that it would stop developing the Presto render engine and switch to the Webkit engine, which powers the browsers Safari and Chrome, among others. After several test versions, the first stable release has now been released. However, several functions that Opera users are used to are still missing, such as Opera Link, mouse gestures, Dragonfly, password manager and bookmark syncing. E-mailing is also no longer possible, but a separate client is available. The release notes for this release are as follows:

Fixes and stability enhancements since the Opera 12 series

General and User Interface

Opera 15 is a major reinvention for Opera. Going forward, the browser’s source code will be based on Chromium and Blink, a fork of the WebKit rendering engine.

Everything for this browser is new:

• New rendering engine based on WebKit
• New user interface
• New capabilities
• New features
• Improved site compatibility
• Silent car updates

As Opera has recreated its desktop browser, features will be introduced selectively and iteratively.

New features

Combined address and search bar
Opera 15 combines the address and search bar, allowing for multiple predictive results that can be filtered by search engine. This bar includes options for adding current pages to Opera’s Speed ​​Dial or Stash, and expandable page information.

Enhanced Speed ​​Dial
Opera 15 allows you to combine Speed ​​Dial entries into groups, and introduces a search function that filters through entries.

stash
Opera 15 introduces Stash – a feature that records the location, meta data, and a screenshot of a page. It places this information into a collapsable list entry on the browser’s Start Page, that can be searched by keyword and/or scanned visually by screenshot.

discover
A recommender service is included with Opera 15. Discover displays news and topical content that can be filtered by category or location/language.

Off road mode
Opera 15 adopts the server-side compression technology used by Opera Mobile.

Improvements since Opera 15 Next (initial channel release)

• Stability enhancements
• Reintroduction of mouse gestures
• Improved address field behavior
• Improved proxy support
• Performance improvement for retina display on Mac
• Support for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and XP
• Support for migrating Opera 12 profile data; see the help pages