Opera 47 Stable improves usability
Opera Software released Opera 47 to the stable release channel on August 9, 2017 after a shorter than usual release cycle.
This shorter release cycle means that less major features are introduced in Opera 47, and that the bulk of improvements fall into the lighter category.
The browser comes with usability improvements first and foremost: new export all bookmarks option, custom number of closed tabs that can be restored, personal newsfeed improvements, and smoother video playback on devices running Windows 7.
Opera 47
Opera 47 comes with improved bookmark exporting options. The new bookmark exporting feature exports all bookmarks -- bookmarks, Speed Dial, and bookmarks bar -- as a single HTML bookmarks file.
To use the functionality, select Opera > Bookmarks > Show all Bookmarks, and then on the page that opens the Export bookmarks link in the sidebar on the left.
Save the HTML file to any location on your system. Some browsers support the importing of HTML bookmarks files, but you may also use the file directly, for instance by uploading it to a location on the Internet so that you can access it at any time and any browser.
The Opera browser comes with support of a personal news feed. This works similarly to RSS feeds, but comes with a selection of "top" news sources right away.
Opera users may add custom sources to the personal news feed. The news feed is updated regularly with new content, and Opera 47 comes with two new scan intervals.
The two new options scan news feed updates every three or six hours. The default is set to 30 minutes, and the new longer intervals are designed specifically for situations where data is of a premium. Users who only access the news feed every now and then may also set these new intervals to save data.
Opera's tab restoration feature keeps track of the last 32 tabs that were closed in the web browser. The previous default was set to 10 tabs. This means basically that Opera users can restore more closed tabs than before.
Tabs are restored in the Opera browser with a right-click on a tab and the selection of "reopen last closed tab". It is furthermore possible to click on the "two vertical lines and down arrow" (tab menu) icon in the Opera main toolbar to display all recently closed tabs instead to pick one for restoration from the listing.
Video playback issues on YouTube were fixed on Opera 47 for Windows 7 and Mac OS X. The video pop-out feature of Opera, which lets you move videos to their own window when they play, has smoother video playback as well in the new version of the Opera web browser.
Opera 47 was updated to Chromium 60. Screensaver files, those with the .scf file extension, were added to the list of risky file extensions in Opera 47 for Windows.
Additional information on the Opera 47 release are available on the Opera blog.
Chromium is certainly a dedicated fashion setter.All these supposedly wonderful and shiny browsers like to wear the coat of chromium,
1.vivaldi.
2.srware iron.
3.dragon.
4.cent.
No doubt there are countless other spins.
is it possible we can actually create a “new” browser instead of these fashionable off-shoots.?
Opera’s Oslo Desktop team laid off – many quit!
@ ww.com,
ShintoPlasm’s suspicions about spying are well-founded since Opera sends every site users visit back to its servers: https://www.howtogeek.com/104263/how-to-optimize-opera-for-maximum-privacy/
Wow, Alex, your English is superb!! (Unless there are better translation apps out there than I am aware of ) My compliments!!
You just try and watch as much 80s stuff as I.
Thanks
P.S. Of course our translation services are superb to those of the rotten west!! Come and try yourself, Comrade!
P.P.S. Oh, it’s not 60’s anymore.. damn..
What do you think about brave as an alternative browser?
If they get VPN! ;)
Seems like Opera’s development is sluggish compared to Vivaldi. If Opera keeps it at that pace then I’ll be looking for Brave for sure – but I need VPN. A lot of Opera users are addicted to the built in VPN.
Correction – opera 12.15 was the best browser ever.
Best browser today is vivaldi.
I believe by “Screen saver files” you mean “.scr” files, rather than “.scf”?
Henk van Setten, I found a link to the full offline installer on Opera’s website. Simply go to the Computer browsers page, http://www.opera.com/computer, and you will see a link titled “Download the offline package”. That will take you to the URL you listed.
The Opera company uses an online installer. So their default “installer” is not a real installer but a tiny 1 Mb executable that.when run, will automatically download and then run the full Opera installer — without the user having any control over that download procedure or its data streams. Also, this will not keep the actual installer around, so you cannot easily copy it to re-use it on your other PC’s, which means that every system will have to re-download the full 36 Mb set of files again.
This kind of setup is becoming ever more popular among software companies. In combination with auto-updates from previous versions (which they also prefer us to do) this offers them more opportunities to collect extensive, exact data about the number of installations, and about the system where the software is installed on. But not every user (me included) will like this.
Luckily, Opera still does offer the actual full installer files: they can be downloaded directly from a file directory. But the Opera website does not clearly mention this or clearly show where to find them — obviously, they prefer us to use their default procedure.
So, the full 36 Mb offline installer for the latest Windows version can be found here:
https://get.geo.opera.com/pub/opera/desktop/47.0.2631.39/win/Opera_47.0.2631.39_Setup.exe
If you go up one level from the “win” directory, you’ll find the full installers for Linux and Mac too.
Offline installer of Opera is quite easy to find here – http://blogs.opera.com/desktop/
I check this page regularly (more or less) to check for new versions and changelogs and download offline installer from there
Notice that little “newspaper(?)” icon on address bar when on https://blogs.opera.com/desktop/ ?
Click that to choose RSS/ATOM feed to subscribe.
Then on your speed dial / Reborn Sidebar there’s “personal news” all your subscribed feeds appear there. There’s also a graphic notification when new stuff in.
Stopped using Opera as main browser since they sold themselves to China, with exception of occasional VPN use (it was convenient and quick at first, but now TOR looks like a much better option speed wise). Anyway, I’m from Russia and the government “went China” on us peasants and now only those VPN providers who agree to prevent their users to circumvent restrictions imposed by the government stooges are “allowed to exist”. A few days ago I noticed that I can’t access a few restricted sites with Opera anymore, even though I was connected through another country/have noscript etc. It said that the site is blocked in Russian Federation (no issues with TOR or other VPN). So yeah.. Screw Opera. Fight the power.
I posted on the Opera blog site to complain about the drop in speed, causing Opera to crash. I started noticing that in v. 46, and it persists in v.47.
@ Alex
I thought VPNs had been banned altogether ? If not the case, what are the restrictions ? Just a list of banned sites you can’t access ? Something else on top of that ?
Also, what’s the situation regarding Tor ? I thought it had been banned, too, as would be expected. There were quite a few Tor relays in Russia, weren’t there ?
The policy comes in force this November. At first we’ve heard that only those VPNs who agree to force a certain statewide blacklist will legally operate in Russia, then I’ve heard them talking about blanket ban.
I have at least two reasons not to research it any deeper:
1- it’s nearly impossible to make sense of Russian politicians and their stupid and ignorant laws and ideas, but the efforts to do so will certainly be incredibly time consuming
and
2 – their stupid and ignorant laws and ideas are extremely ineffective and easily circumvented. Really, what could be done – worst case? They will add a few thousand more sites to their list and oust a few hundred VPN companies from the country. So you’ll just access the aforementioned sites via Tor or free VPN to buy yourself some VPN, or by some other means.
Look at China – okay, so they’ll use some deep traffic filtering system and will block your encrypted traffic – then you just switch to TCP 443, SSL or some other protocol over protocol.
The worst thing about the story is that I get used to how ISP speed grew higher and higher over the last 15 years and now instead of 60mbps I’ll only get 6 with all that tunneling. Oh, well.. Less YouTube for me. Good riddance.
I didn’t heard anything specific about Tor except for an arrest of a guy, who hosted a relay which was used by someone to watch child porn or do anti-government activism or something like that.
I expect our politicians will learn about Tor existence in the next 5 to 15 years. I expect to reside and chill out somewhere in the Bahamas at this time, though.
Opera is honestly the best browser right now.
@ Rush:
A very interesting point about those certificates. I guess that for a Chinese consortium, it would be counter-intuitive to disable a certificate which is used so widely within their main target market. Sadly, this also shows how Opera’s decision-making is no longer informed by users’ well-being and data protection alone.
Seems a lot like Vivaldi to me. There some commonalities engine and UI wise.
Microsoft has had enough of the Chinese Certificate Authorities (CAs) WoSign and its subsidiary StartCom’s poor security. Soon, neither Internet Explorer nor Edge will recognize new security certificates from either company.
WoSign has been accused of dishonesty and continued and persistent deception.” Unfortunately, both CAs had large installed user bases, largely because both had offered free certificates.
Mozilla was the first web browser company to announce that it would “no longer trust newly-issued certificates issued by either of these two CA brands.” Google followed Mozilla in no longer trusting the CA vendors’ certificates in July 2017
.” Apple has also dropped support for WoSign certificates.”
One web browser is likely to continue to trust WoSign certificates: Opera. Opera was bought by the Chinese consortium Golden Brick Silk Road in 2016. Golden Brick, in turn, is made up of Beijing mobile games vendor Kunlun Tech and Qihoo 360. The latter owns WoSign and StartCom.
WoSign claimed that it would clean up its act in a memo in October 2016. That hasn’t happened.
The company’s website ignores the issue, “Why NOT WoSign? you need a trusted CA to issue browser trusted SSL certificate for you, WoSign is your best choice. And WoSign China is one of the largest digital certificate provider in China, has more than 70 percent market share in China.”
So yeah…there’s that!
reference:http://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-dumps-notorious-chinese-secure-certificate-vendor/
With nothing to back it up beyond your opinion.
I agree that it is an excellent browser with a dedicated dev team and surprisingly useful features, and I like it a lot despite some really annoying quirks and some Chrome-specific incompatibilities. Just sad that it has this whole ‘Chinese spying’ cloud hanging over it, with no way to verify how much of the suspicions are actually founded…
Sympathies, man. That sounds horrible!
UK next if Teresa May and her gang have their way. Purely for our own protection, of course.
The new Opera UI on Windows 7… makes me wanna rip my eyes out. xD