Opera is a seemingly small name among desktop browsers, but it’s a tough competitor on the mobile platform, with users of both smartphones and feature phones using it regularly. Why Opera hasn’t been able to compete with browsers like Chrome and Firefox is hard to say, but the team behind it is looking to fix that. The company has just brought Opera Next – its bleeding edge version that’s a bit like Chrome’s Canary and Firefox’s Aurora builds – to Windows and Mac. The brand new Opera Next 15 comes with a new engine working under the hood, plenty of new features, and a brand new interface. Opera 15 is now running on Chromium and the difference that has made becomes apparent the second you launch it.


Not only has its startup time improved, but pages load faster as well. Interface wise, the URL bar and the Search bar have been combined into one, and you can change the search engine for your current search query right from this bar as well. Bookmarks have been canned in favor of the new Stash feature, which is something like a reading list for pages you intend to visit later. Websites saved to your Speed Dial can now be grouped into folders, and the Discover feature allows you to view trending stories from all over the world or a particular category. Lastly, ‘Off-Road Mode’ has been introduced, which uses the same server-side compression technology that Opera uses in its mobile browsers to speed up content loading on slow connections.


New Interface
The tab switcher and and panels bar is now history; when you launch Opera, you are presented with the Speed dial, a search bar just above it, buttons for switching between the speed dial, Stash, and Discover pages, a search box for the speed dial, and the unified URL & Search bar at the very top. The Opera menu has done away with bookmarks, and all settings open as tabs in the current window.