Today, Opera becomes the first major browser after Apple’s Safari to introduce support for the Touch Bar in a final version.

How you can browse with Touch Bar

Opera’s implementation of Touch Bar enables contextual actions such as going back, focusing the address field, and navigating through Speed Dials. The most interesting feature for most of you will probably be navigating through multiple tabs as you slide your finger across the website icons. Icons have different colors and backgrounds, giving you a nice-looking and distinguishable overview of your tabs.

When we first saw the Touch Bar, we immediately recognized how it could be useful for the browser, allowing people to switch tabs without lifting their eyes from the keyboard to the tab bar on top of the screen. We were surprised to find Safari’s implementation to show tiny thumbnails of web pages in the relatively small touchbar area.

Under the hood

Opera 44 features our own tuned-up version of Chromium 57. This adds support for CSS Grid Layout and WebAssembly which we believe has the potential to bring browser games to the next level. Try one out here.

Also from Chromium, the new background tab throttling has been added, providing additional energy consumption reductions to the battery saver feature introduced to Opera in May 2016.

Opera 44 also adds support for the Credential Management API. This gives users a simpler sign-in process across devices and provides websites with more control over the usage of credentials. The website can use password-based sign-ins via this API. Once logged in, users will be automatically signed back into a site, even if their session has expired.

Thanks you for all the feedback and support! We hope you will enjoy browsing with this new version of Opera!

Installation links: