As the nights grow longer and the days become colder and crisper, it’s a frenzy of activity in Poland and Norway. Our developers have been labouring on a new release of Opera for Mac and Windows, while bidding farewell to their house-elves who are going for their annual secondment to the North Pole for present-wrapping duties.

Today, we’re very proud to release Opera 18. Note that even the numerals look like an elf skiing to Svalbard next to a snowman.

But what will you discover, wrapped in this beautiful package?

Microphone and Camera integration

Firstly, Opera 18 integrates your microphone and camera, allowing sites that make use of the getUserMedia and webRTC APIs, allowing lots of fun effects without plugins.

Create search engine with two clicks

To add a new search engine to Opera, right-click in a search field on a web page and choose “Create Search Engine” from the context menu. Choose keyword and name, click ok and done!

For example if you choose “d” for duckduckgo, the next time you want to search duckduckgo, simply type d elf+disco+svarlbard into the search/ address bar to find all about this exciting topic.

Draggable tabs

You can now drag tabs between windows or drag them out to create a new one. Of course you cannot drag between private and non-private windows.

I’m themeing of a white christmas

Opera 18 is now themeable. You can download themes from Opera add-ons. If you want to create a theme to promote your company, favourite band, football team or photographs of otters, read our tutorial Themes in Opera 18+.

What’s next?

In the next two weeks, we’ll promote the experimental Opera Developer to feature-complete Opera Next so you can try out a new stuff. In the meantime, please let us know how Opera 18 works out for you!