Opera 46.0 is out: find out what is new

Opera Software released Opera 46.0 on June 22, 1017 to the Stable channel brings along with it stability improvements and quality improvements.

Opera states that the release  is the second stage of the Reborn project, a project to improve the look and feel of the Opera browser.

Opera users can use the browser's automatic update functionality to download and install the Opera 46.0 update, or download it directly from the Opera website.

A click on Menu > About Opera runs a manual update check in the browser. If the new version is detected, it will be downloaded and installed automatically.

Opera 46.0

The first major release after Opera Reborn introduces a number of improvements, visually, usability-wise, and functionality-wise.

The Speed Dial page, the New Tab Page of the Opera browser, received several improvements in the new Opera browser version.

Users who use the dark theme without wallpapers will notice that Speed Dial itself is now dark as well. Opera Software cooperated with industry artists to bring a new set of custom wallpapers to the browser.

You can set those with a click on the customize button on the Speed Dial page, and the selection of one of the available wallpapers there.

Some backgrounds are animated, but there is no indication right now to highlight that in the selection menu.

Opera 46.0 ships with stability improvements. According to Opera Software, Opera 46.0 will crash 35% less on average per user than the previous stable version Opera 45.0. This was achieved by fixing crashes, memory leaks, and glitches that impaired the user experience.

Another new feature is support for animated PNG files. The format has risen to some prominence, largely thanks to Apple introducing the APNG format in iOS 10 iMessage applications. What's particular interesting about this is that Opera Presto, used by the classic Opera 12 browser, supported the format already.

Opera 46.0 uses Chromium 59 as its core. The new Chromium release introduced several new technologies, among them expensive background tabs throttling to improve battery life and browsing performance by limiting the access of background tabs to resources.

Other improvements mentioned in the changelog:

• Videopopout support live videos now
• New View in Bookmarks option to Bookmarks pop up.
• If you import bookmarks from other browsers, those that were on the bookmarks toolbar of the source browser are now placed on Opera's Bookmarks Toolbar as well.
• Bookmarks sync using Chromium's sync protocol.
• opera://plugins redirects to opera://settings?section=plugins now. Opera followed Google and removed the local plugins management page from the web browser.

Closing Words

Opera 46.0 introduces some new features and improvements to the browser. Probably the most important one is the improvement of browser stability. The remaining features are not overly spectacular however.

Now You: Have you tried a recent version of the Opera browser?