Opera 16 Released in the Wild

This morning, we’ve spun out Opera 16 stable from our Opera Next stream.

Some of the bigger changes include advanced settings in opera:flags, auto-fill support for forms, Geolocation support, start page options (e.g. you can disable Discover content preloading), and an engine update to Chromium 29 (Opera 15 was on Chromium 28).

On the extensions front, we now support the chrome.cookies and chrome.history APIs, and you can now use geolocation and, if really necessary, even NPAPI plugins in your extensions. Of course, all of these additions are documented in our Opera extensions documentation, and we’ve added more extension templates and samples as well for you to build your extensions on.

Also worth mentioning is that there is now no longer a limitation of 6 extension buttons in the browser UI, which was an issue for people with many extensions installed.

To celebrate this release and the milestone of 300 extensions for Opera 15 and higher in our catalog, we’ve published an interview with Brian Kennish from Disconnect, in which he sheds a light on the thinking behind the Disconnect extension, the team’s UX process, what tools they use, what’s coming up next, and more.

Give it a spin and let us know what you think! And if you’re curious about what’s in the pipeline, check out our Developer stream, which contains a lot of the features you’ll find in upcoming Opera versions.