A small maintenance update is out for Opera

Nov 17, 2015 13:01 GMT  ·  By

Opera Software ASA has just revealed that a new stable version of the Opera browser has been released and is now available for download.

The first stable build of the Opera 33.x branch was launched on October 27, but developers don't abandon a particular branch after it is made available, even if most of the effect goes into the other builds that are being worked on.

It also means that people shouldn't expect to see any kind of major changes in the new 33.x version, just some maintenance fixes and other small improvements.

Opera is moving pretty far away from Google Chrome, even if they are using the same base, Chromium. The application already has a number of features that are unique to this platform and it looks like changing the Preston engine that they had used for almost a decade was the right decision.

Opera 33 brings a special fix for Linux users

Most of the entries in the changelog are pretty innocuous, but there is something that got our attention. We have recently written that Firefox is enabling the use of FFMpeg on Linux systems if the necessary components are already present.

Developers are going on a different route for Opera. If a process already has all the required codecs, it will no longer load FFmpeg. This might actually be a good idea since it should make the browser just a little bit faster.

According to the changelog, some UI bugs that occurred with new maximized windows have been corrected, the "never save password" function now works as it should, and a bug that was preventing some users from installing extensions from local files has been fixed as well.

You can download the latest Opera 33 for Linux from Softpedia, and the Windows and Mac OS X versions can be downloaded from the same page. Enjoy!