Opera 21 moves from the Developer stream to the Next stream.

Most of the changes are under the hood. Opera 21 supports Aura, a hardware-accelerated rendering of the browser. This enables less-taxing user-interface animations and a sleeker, more responsive feel to the whole UI. It also gives us a solid foundation on which to make future UI changes.

Aura is a big change, but we’ve also included a small change that will please many of you. There’s now a setting to make Opera always show the absolute address, the full URL, in the address field.

While many of you appreciate our emphasis on the domain name and our decision to display only the essential information, our power users and web developers often need to see the full URL. Now, they can. Simply enable the advanced settings and select show full URL in combined search and address bar under Opera’s user interface options. It’s “Hello, absolute address!” from then on.

As usual, we’re hugely grateful for your bug reports and comments. Thank you.

Full changelog