Opera 15 was just released. Opera 15 is a major reinvention for Opera. From now on Opera browser will be based on Chromium and Blink. In other words Opera will use Chrome's source code as a base. Chromium and Blink themselves are a fork of the WebKit rendering engine. So it's forks of forks of forks. If you don't want to use Opera 15 you can still stick with Opera 12. Opera team promises they'll keep Opera 12.x up to date and secure for quite some time.

Opera 15 is based on Chrome

Try Opera 15 in Browserling now!

What's new in Opera 15?

Everything is new in Opera 15!

  • New rendering engine based on Chrome, Blink and WebKit.
  • Improved site compatibility.
  • Silent auto updates.
  • New user interface.
  • New capabilities.
  • New features.

Starting Opera 15 there's going to be a new release cycle:

  • Opera Stable

Released every couple of weeks, this is the most solid version, ready for mission-critical daily use.

  • Opera Next

Updated more frequently than Stable, this is the feature-complete candidate for the Stable version. While it should be ready for daily use, you can expect some bugs there.

  • Opera Developer

A bleeding edge version, you can expect a lot of fancy stuff there. Some nasty bugs might also appear from time to time.

What unique features separate from Chrome does Opera 15 have?

  • Combined address and search bar

Opera 15 combines the address and search bar, allowing for multiple predictive results that can be filtered by search engine. This bar includes options for adding current pages to Opera's Speed Dial or Stash, and expandable page information.

  • Enhanced Speed Dial

Opera 15 allows you to combine Speed Dial entries into groups, and introduces a search function that filters through entries.

  • Stash

Opera 15 introduces Stash. Staash is a feature that records the location, meta data, and a screenshot of a page. It places this information into a collapsable list entry on the browser's Start Page, that can be searched by keyword and/or scanned visually by screenshot.

  • Discover

A recommender service is included with Opera 15. Discover displays news and topical content that can be filtered by category or location/language.

  • Off-Road mode

Opera 15 adopts the server-side compression technology used by Opera Mobile.

What improvements does Opera 15 have since last release?

  • Support for migrating Opera 12 profile data.
  • Improved address field behavior.
  • Improved proxy support.
  • Support for 64-bit versions of Windows Vista and XP.
  • Reintroduction of mouse gestures.
  • Performance improvement for retina display on Mac.

As Opera is now based on a Chrome fork all new features will be introduced iteratively and selectively. Happy cross-browser testing in Opera 15!