A few months ago, Opera has confirmed that it’s moving away from its browser engine Presto, adopting Google’s Chromium. Now that Chromium is based on Blink – which is a fork of Webkit, Opera too relies on it.
Today, they have released the future version (read: beta) of Opera. They call it Opera Next.
Firstly, the browser is already available for Android, and now can be tried on Windows and Mac too. As it is based on Chromium, it apparently shares a lot of similarities with it (take a look at the settings page).
The main focus seems to be on Speed Dial and Discover features. Discover basically allows you to browse through news, you might totally find it irrelevant if you already use something like Flipboard or any RSS reader. The Speed Dial tiles look huge and beautiful, they’re also customisable.
They have also introduced a new ‘Stash’ feature. It seems like a place for your favourite sites. You get a large preview of them in the Stash tab. But really, I didn’t find a point in it.
Like you’d expect, there’s Opera Turbo, which is the main reason for Opera being popular. It’s called ‘Off-Road mode’ in Opera Next.
The traditional version of Opera used to support share sheets on Mac, I really liked that. Opera Next on the other hand, doesn’t support OS X Mountain Lion’s sharing features.
As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of stuff they’ve released, but as Blink gets better I’m sure you can expect features in Opera (and Chrome).
Hit the link below to download and give Opera Next a try.
Link: Opera Next
2 Comments
Does it run 64bit engine, like Opera’s current version? Or is it 32bit based?
It seems like there’s no 64 bit version of Opera Next for Windows. Not sure about Mac.