As the summer continues, our offices have the best airconditioners in Norway and Poland, so our developers have been in them, working to bring you Opera 17 Developer stream. This stream is our bleeding edge development; features will be piloted, and may be shelved, taken back to the drawing board, or taken forward to the Opera Next stream – feature complete, but potentially buggy. Once the bugs have been ironed out, the features are released as stable, and once every few weeks the streams are all refreshed. You can follow all three if you want, but please note that you shouldn’t entrust valuable data to anything other than the released stable stream.

Downloads

Opera 17 Developer for Mac
Opera 17 Developer for Windows

So, what’s new in Opera 17 Developer? Amongst the others, we have prioritized some of the things you have been asking for.

• Start up mode option – yes, more options! You can pick one of: last session, speed dial, set of pages
• Pinned tabs – a nice beginning of future tabs improvements.
• Rocker gestures – (left->right click, right->left click)
• Extension APIs – more API stuff to play with: bookmarks, commands, omnibox, webNavigation. Separated article with detailed API’s explanation will be shipped later.
• Search engine manager – On top of the current shortcuts to search in the addressbar, (enter the one character shortcut plus your shortcut: “b” for Bing, “g” for google) you can now customize your searches, so go ahead and add “d” for duckduckgo, “m” for your own site, “o” for Opera desktop team blog, or anything else!

Candidate features near ready for O17 (currently turned off in opera:flags)

• Themes – you can now download themes for Opera. These are backwards compatible, so themes that worked in Opera 12 will work in Opera 17 Developer.
• Camera/mic – we’ve re-plumbed the web cam and microphone, so your getUserMedia fun is reinstated! This is not working on Mac correctly yet, but feel free to check it out on Windows.
• HiDPI Support (Windows) – for the ones running in hi-resolution on small screens, we are delivering you better pixels experience.

Coming soon

As summer turns to autumn, we’ll turn our attention to improved tabs handling: vertical tabs, visual tabs, tab cycler, move tabs between windows, quick access bar (aka bookmarks bar), synchronization.. We’ve planned further bookmarks enhancements, further synchronization development, site preferences, and more. (Hint: so please don’t fill up the comments asking when they’ll be released – the answer, as always, is “when they’re ready”. Like autumn berries, they need to be ripe before they’re picked.

Note that in this version we present more changes than in O16. Yet till O18 hits next stream, you should be able to see even more changes included :D. As the vacation time is getting over :cry:, the rapid development cycle becomes really rapid 🙂

Happy testing!

Opera Team

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