14 DAY TRIAL // The Opera developers have pushed a new stable version out the door, bringing the version number up to 33. Quite a few improvements have been made in this iteration, but the most interesting thing in this release is about the contributions made by the Opera team to the Chromium project.
Since the release of Opera 15, the Internet browser has been using Chromium as a base. They used to have something called the Presto engine, which they used for many years, but they moved on to Chromium. There was some opposition at first, and the browser had to re-implement some features that used to be available. Things are much better now, there is feature parity between various platforms, and the application is getting faster with each new release.
One of the reasons Opera continues to improve is that developers are contributing to Chromium as well. They wanted to make sure that Opera keeps its edge and that it remains one of the fastest browsers around. The only way to do that is to make sure that Chromium is also fast, and that devs don't have to face problems from upstream.
Opera 33 is special for Linux users
Most of the changes made in each development cycle usually cover all the platform, but some of the modifications are OS specific. Such is the case with the latest version for Linux, which just got proprietary codecs support.
"Opera is now able to detect whether the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra package is installed. As long as this package is up-to-date (45.0.2454.x and newer), Opera can make use of the libraries in this package to provide support for some proprietary codecs for media elements, including H264 and MP3," noted the developers a few days back.
It's also worth pointing out that Opera also got a new Logo to replace that old one. It kind of looks like Moebius strip. You can download the latest version of Opera for Linux from Softpedia or the official website.
