It’s been roughly a month since Opera released the first preview of its Chromium and Blink infused browser reboot. Now, the Norwegian company is ready with Opera 15 for Windows and Mac, marking its first consumer-ready launch since dumping the Presto engine that powered its browser for years.
Download: Opera 15 for Windows / Mac
If you already took Opera Next for a spin back in May there’s not much new here. Anyone else will notice it sports a fresh design that bears some resemblance to Google’s Chrome with the address and search bars combined into one, but it also has a number of features that distinguish it from Google's browser.
Among them is a new Discover tab that displays curated content from popular news sources. Meanwhile, Stash lets users save pages for later, but unlike Instapaper or Pocket, it isn’t geared for reading by stripping most visual content. Instead it serves as a web-clipping tool for interesting stuff you find online. Opera will record the location, meta data, and a screenshot of a page, then place this information into a collapsable list entry.
Other notable features include off-road mode -- a proxy-browser mode that uses server caching to save bandwidth -- and a tweaked Speed Dial function that let’s you group multiple items into a folder.
With the move to Chromium and Blink, Opera is moving to a new release strategy comprising three different branches: Opera Developer, Opera Next for stable betas, and Opera Stable for final releases.
There is still no official list of features coming to the redesigned browser. However, according to the official announcement on the Opera Desktop Team blog, Opera is already working on on synchronization (aka Opera Link), enhanced tab management (visual tabs and so on) and support for themes, among other things.
