Opera introduces audio indicator in Opera 28

Martin Brinkmann
Jan 16, 2015
Opera
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12

The most recent Developer edition of the Opera browser, version 28.0.1745 ships with a new feature that highlights tabs in the browser if audio is playing on websites loaded in those tabs.

There are not many features that I wish Firefox would have that Chrome has already. One that is high up on that list is Chrome's ability to not only indicate whether audio is playing in a tab but also its means to mute it without having to switch to that tab first to use on-page controls.

Opera Software made the first step towards that implementation with today's release of Opera Developer 28.0.1745.

The audio indicator feature the browser ships with needs to be enabled before it becomes available. The easiest way to do just that is to load the following url in the browser and switch the tab audio indicator preference from disabled to enabled: opera://flags/#tab-audio-indicator

opera audio indicator

As the name suggests, this is merely an indicator right now. It works reasonably well however both on sites using HTML5 or Adobe Flash to play audio.

I have tested this even on Flash game sites and the feature worked properly on those as well. Since the feature is hidden behind a preference right now, I'd assume that Opera wants to test it more before it enables it for all users of the Developer version.

The company has not revealed when audio indicators will become available in the stable version of Opera nor if it plans to improve the feature further by enabling mute options right in tabs just like Chrome does.

Since it does support Pepper Flash, it could very well implement that feature, something that Mozilla cannot.

Opera version 28 was shipped with an assortment of bookmark improvements included. Bookmarks are displayed in the address bar drop-down for instance now and there is an option to remove a bookmark again in the popup which can be useful if you bookmarked a site accidentally or want to remove it at a later point in time.

opera-remove

If you are interested in the Developer edition of Opera but have not downloaded it yet, you can download the latest version on the Opera website.

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Opera introduces audio indicator in Opera 28
Article Name
Opera introduces audio indicator in Opera 28
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Opera Software has added a new tab audio indicator feature to the latest Developer version of the Opera browser.
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Comments

  1. Spade said on January 31, 2015 at 6:34 pm
    Reply

    Not sure why people still feel the need to hate on Chromium-based Opera after all this time. If you don’t like it, don’t use it, and be happy with what you do use. Life’s too short to spend so much time focusing on things you don’t like.

    I’d tried Opera a number of times in the past, as I respected their innovations and generally enjoy using multiple browsers. But the user experience of Opera 12 and earlier always felt “weird” to me, overloaded with far too many unnecessary options and experimental UI approaches that just didn’t make sense. I think their success with innovations like browser tabs went to their heads a bit!

    I gave it another try sometime after the switch to Chromium with Opera 15, and it’s been one of my favorite desktop browsers since then – bringing the power of Google Chrome without the creepiness of Google. And the preferences in Opera (particularly those for privacy and content control) are a lot easier to navigate than what’s happened to them in Chromium.

    As a programmer, I can appreciate the approach Opera took with their browser reboot – stripping everything down to the bare essentials, and slowly adding needed features over time. That being said, I can see how users of Opera 12 and earlier, accustomed to an overabundance of options and settings, would be unhappy with these changes. Those folks might be interested to know that the cofounder of Opera has a new browser in the works for power users – Vivalldi: https://www.ghacks.net/2015/01/27/opera-co-founder-launches-vivaldi-web-browser/

    1. Brandon said on April 6, 2015 at 2:09 am
      Reply

      agreed, I’m pretty happy with the new opera for the most part. Chrome has become rather bloated over the years, and opera provides a nice stripped down chromium shell, with a few unique features. My only real problems with it at the moment is that the new bookmarks manager still needs significant polish.

  2. Petar said on January 18, 2015 at 8:56 pm
    Reply

    Is it possible to block loading of HTML5 videos in Opera?

  3. anon said on January 17, 2015 at 12:57 pm
    Reply

    How are they still alive? Granted we don’t have many browser market share news nowadays so I’m not sure if they still have presence at all (beside on the occasional ghacks article).

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on January 17, 2015 at 2:02 pm
      Reply

      They are doing quite well on mobile and on devices.

  4. hue said on January 17, 2015 at 9:59 am
    Reply

    “The Most Annoying About Opera”

    ok.

  5. Dukislav said on January 17, 2015 at 9:51 am
    Reply

    – Still no proper bookmark manager.
    – Can’t export (backup) bookmarks.
    – Can’t select easily multiple bookmarks.


    Waiting for v50.0 or so…

  6. Shadess said on January 17, 2015 at 1:30 am
    Reply

    Gone from others copying Opera to Opera lagging behind adding the same stuff found in chrome months before.
    Hope they’ve done more than a facelift to the bookmarks. The performance is awfull, I’m on a fairly recent I7, 16gigs of ram and an SSD and it takes ages for the bookmarks tab to open properly. Also not nice it always by default saves images for the bookmarks. Thats going to be gigabytes of useless data after a while for me. Search for something and it doesn’t even remember to keep the list view if you use the search, reverts to the default tiles. The folder structure for the bookmarks sucks too. Opera is still a mess.

    1. Brandon said on April 6, 2015 at 2:02 am
      Reply

      No problem loading the bookmarks page here on slower specs. comes up instantly on both my machines (desktop: i5-2500, 16gb ram, ssd) and my macbook air 2013 (4gb ram)

      I agree that the folder structure is rather wonky though. Hopefully that will improve when they finish implementing tree view.

    2. GunGunGun said on January 18, 2015 at 2:51 pm
      Reply

      Switch to Palemoon, nearly good as opera 12-

      1. anon said on January 19, 2015 at 8:32 am
        Reply

        Still far away for my need, barebone.

  7. Dave said on January 16, 2015 at 11:30 pm
    Reply

    Good ol’ Opera. The new version is reallly nice. It’s crazy that they aren’t the market leader.

    After the Chromium-transition they lost me to Firefox and I prefer Firefox now because of the powerful extensions. I can’t say I like the default button set in Firefox, but I use the Proper Buttons extension to fix that :)

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