With the latest blog post by the Opera Desktop team it seems likely that we will see a Windows 8 version of the browser in the future.
For now Opera is working on improving the Opera experience for the classic desktop experience of Windows 8. This includes adding support for touch interactions with the Opera UI.
A new build of Opera 12.50—the upcoming version of Opera—has been posted that includes support for common touch based gestures such as pinch to zoom, inertia page and UI scrolling, drag and drop using touch etc.
Since Opera already offers a version of their browser for Android and iOS tablets there is good reason to believe that they will have a Windows 8-style Opera as well.
The addition of these new features has a nice side effect that it enables touch-based operation of Opera on Windows 7 as well. In case you didn’t know multi-touch support was introduced in Windows 7 itself, however there are very few devices that take advantage of this feature. If you have one though, Opera will now work well with it.
In fact last year when Opera Software released Opera 11 for mobile, they released a version of Opera Mobile for Windows 7 (click here to download it) as well. This version is fully touch capable, and sports the tablet UI rather than the normal Opera UI. It does not seem that this version has been updated since then though.
You can find out more about the touch-enabled preview build of Opera 12.50 (and download it) here.
