Opera 52 is out! It is based on Chromium 65 (hence it inherits its changes) and comes with an improved ad blocker and more fun features that we'll summarize in this post for you. We already installed it on our cross-browser testing platform so you can try them out there as well.

Cross-browser testing in Opera 52

Try Opera 52 in Browserling!

New Features in Opera 52

  • Faster ad blocker

Opera cares for our protection. Its ad blocker was implemented over two years ago and earlier this year it added security against cryptojacking with the NoCoin Cryptocurrency Mining Protection feature. Opera now has faster ad blocker that outperformed not only its predecessor, but also Google Chrome's ad blocking contender. To a huge extent Opera's string matching algorithms can get the credit for that. The whole optimization resulted in faster page loading time.

Opera 52 Total average loading time for 15 websites

  • Select multiple tabs and copy page addresses

Rarely someone browses with just one tab opened. Opera 52 enhances further the way users can interact with their tabs, especially executing actions on multiple tabs at once. Another thing that worths mentioning is the new close tab shortcut. How to select multiple tabs at once? Maybe you can guess it yourself. Same way you select multiple icons at once on your desktop - just press control and select multiple tabs and you can then perform actions on all of them at once. Holding down Shift and clicking on a tab will select all other tabs to its right. Tabs context menu has a new feature called Copy page address(es). It is an action to be performed on multiple tabs. As the name suggests, this will copy all the page's addresses to the clipboard for easily pasting afterwards. And the last, but not the least: Tabs can be closed by holding Alt while clicking it.

  • New animations

Error pages are boring. All you see is a problem. Opera 52 introduces a whole new set of cool animations to take place in certain errors. For example, on the error "Site can't be reached" you will see this animation:

Opera 52 animation Site can't be reached

There are many other animations and we'll leave them as a surprise to you. Though we hope that you won't see them soon.

New Developer Features in Opera 52

  • Paint Worklet, Paintlet, Paint API.
  • Server Timing API - With the new Server Timing API there is a well defined way for servers to pass performance information to the browser through HTTP headers.
  • The :any-link pseudo selector can be used to style both visited and non-visited links at the same time
  • For colors, the rgb and hsl functions now take an optional fourth alpha value, making them identical to rgba and hsla.
  • display: contents allows an element to wrap other elements without creating a box for itself.
  • There is now an assignedElements() on <slot> elements, which acts like assignedNodes() but only returns element nodes.
  • HTMLAnchorElement.relList will now give an accurate mapping of the rel attribute.
  • document.all can no longer be overwritten.
  • A new feature policy sync-xhr will allow a site to block synchronous XMLHttpRequests.
  • The HTTPS code is updated to match the draft-23 version of the TLS protocol.
  • Request.destination is added to give service workers a better understanding of why a resource is fetched.
  • A toJSON() method has been added to PerformanceResourceTiming, PerformanceLongTaskTiming and TaskAttributionTiming.
  • The download attribute will be ignored on anchor elements with cross-origin attributes.
  • Certificates from Symantec’s Legacy PKI issued after 2017-12-01 will no longer be trusted. This will only affect sites that selected to not transition to DigiCert’s new PKI. More information can be found in the offical announcement.

Highlights from the changelog of Opera 52

  • DNA-66595 [Mac][TouchBar] “Open new tab” slow when a text field is focused
  • DNA-66655 Color of search engine icon backgrounds & names are reversed after switching dark/light theme
  • DNA-67148 crashpad.cc SetRestartCommandLine reimplementation
  • DNA-6 7392 Crash at content::MediaStreamManager::FinalizeOpenDevice().
  • DNA-67623 [Win] “OK” button is not a default option in JS prompt
  • DNA-67810 [Win][HiDPI] Spinner & mute icons are badly scaled for DPI > 225%
  • DNA-67992 [Win10] Wikipedia search engine icon is invisible for dark theme
  • DNA-68062 Crash at opera::PageViewCollection::ActivatePageView(int)
  • DNA-68223 Sliding toolbar for extensions tampering protection is displayed despite the feature flag is disabled
  • DNA-68225 Translations for O52 beta (09.03.2018)

Happy cross-browser testing with Opera 52!