The team behind the popular Opera browser released an updated version. As of this writing, Opera version 52 is in the BETA channel. It should be released to the stable branch very soon. The key change in this new release is a blazingly fast ad blocker.
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Every Opera user knows that the browser has a built-in ad blocking feature, so the user can avoid installing extra extensions and configure the built-in option instead. It supports external subscriptions to privacy lists and adds a button to the address bar. Using it, you can quickly enable or disable it.
A new release, 52.0.2871.0, introduces a faster ad blocker. According to Opera's developers, the changes made to the ad blocking engine allow the browser to load web pages faster than the current stable version, Opera 51, and also faster than Google Chrome in its default configuration.
The official announcement states the following:
This time, we are focusing on browsing speed. The performance gain in our ad blocking mechanism was possible due to an improvement in the string matching algorithm. In order to check how much faster Opera 52 is, we performed some tests. Our benchmark tests were conducted on 15 popular news websites which were tested in ten iterations each. The results show that Opera 52 performed 16 percent faster than Opera 51 and 44 percent faster than Chrome 64 with its newly introduced ad blocker.
The following chart shows the performance test result obtained by Opera.
Besides the improvements made to the ad blocker feature, this release includes a number of changes to tab management.
For instance, you can finally select multiple tabs at once and copy all their web addresses.
Tab management improvements
With Opera 52, selecting multiple individual tabs can be done by holding down Ctrl (⌘ on macOS) and clicking on the tabs. You can also select a range of tabs, from left to right, by holding down the Shift key and clicking on a tab. You are now able to use the same commands with multiple tabs selected that you could with a single tab, including reload, duplicate, pin, close, mute or save to Speed Dial.
A new tab context menu entry, Copy page address(es) allows copying the URL of all the selected tabs at once. This can be useful when you need to share all your open tabs via email or a messaging app with your friends.
Finally, it is now possible to close tabs with Alt + left click.
New animations
Besides these usability changes, there are a number of new fancy animations that were added to this release. There are animations for Network access denied, Internet disconnected, Site can't be reached, and others. See the following screenshots.
Network access denied
Site can't be reached
Download links
The beta version of Opera 52 can be downloaded using the following links.
- Opera beta for Windows (Using Opera beta for Windows installer means Opera for Computers EULA is accepted)
- Opera beta for Windows (Portable version)
- Opera beta for macOS
- Opera beta for Linux – deb packages
- Opera beta for Linux – RPM packages
Source: Opera
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