Opera has released a new browser named Opera Next 15 for the desktop. This is supposedly a beta branch for the main browser where the first ever Opera browser based on Google’s Chromium engine has been released. This is eventually to be merged with the upcoming Google’s Blink rendering engine in the near future. It is in accordance with the recent announcement that Opera would be getting rid of the Presto engine, on which it had been religiously developing its browser for the past few years. Now, that the whole browser has been rewritten from scratch, the norwegian software giant is surely expecting to gain a greater market share with its new browser which is expected to be faster than before.
The new release sees features like the mail client being dumped in favour of a smaller and lighter browser with a lesser memory, though new features have been also been added and some have been rechristened. Some of these include a better speed dial interface, read-it-later like feature called Stash, a content aggregator like Discover and a combined search cum address bar named Smartbox. The mail client is now offered as a separate offering known as Opera Mail. The Opera Turbo compression feature is now known as Off-Road which is useful for browsing
on slower connections, something which the Opera browser is widely known for. Among other things, the browser interface is obviously something which has been given a visual refresh and it certainly looks sleeker and more polished than ever before.
The new version is now available for Microsoft Windows and Mac desktop platforms and it can be downloaded from Opera’s website here. This comes only a week after the browser came out of its beta tag on the Android platfom.
