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Opera 24 Dev introduces bookmarks manager, H.264 support

Norwegian company Opera Software has released a new developer version of its Opera browser for the desktop. While previous updates to Opera were most of the time rather uneventful in terms of new feature support, this one is packed with additions including one that users requested for a long time.

Probably the biggest feature that Opera Software added to Opera Dev 24.0.1555.0 is a bookmarks manager. While it is not enabled yet by default, it is easy enough to do.

For now, you need to load opera://flags/#bookmarks in Opera and flick the value of the preference to enabled. Once done, restart the browser to load the change.

You will then notice a new bookmark icon in the address bar similar to how Google Chrome is displaying that option and how Firefox used to display it.

opera bookmarks manager

When you click on the star, it displays a thumbnail preview of the page you are on. You can use the slider at the bottom to change the zoom level of the thumbnail.

Here you can also delete bookmarks or open the bookmarks manager. It can be opened directly by loading opera://bookmarks/ in the browser and also bookmarked for faster access to the bookmarks.

bookmarks opera

Bookmarks can be edited and removed in the bookmarks manager. There is also an option to create groups and sort them into those

It needs to be noted that this is the first version of the bookmarks manager released for the Dev version of Opera. The feature will see improvements before it lands in the stable version of the browser.

Another new feature is support for H.264 video on Windows. This allows you to load HTML5 video on sites such as YouTube when you are using the Opera browser on Windows.

On YouTube, you need to enable HTML5 video before you can do so, while it should work on most sites automatically if they support HTML5 video.

The Tab Preview feature that Opera Software introduced recently in Opera has been modified. It worked previously by simply moving the mouse over a tab which would then show a thumbnail preview of the open page. The mouse needs to rest now for a short while before the preview is displayed now.

It is furthermore possible to enable the preview feature when you use the Ctrl-Tab shortcut to flip through open tabs in Opera. To do so, you need to enable the preference opera://flags/#tab-preview-with-keyboard by loading it in Opera.

If you do not use the Tab Preview feature, you can now disable it in the settings, and if you have enabled Power Mode there, you can also modify the delay  before previews are displayed from the default 600ms.

You can read more about the version of Opera on the official Opera Desktop blog. There you also find downloads for all supported operating systems.

This article was first seen on ComTek's "TekBits" Technology News

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