Opera has released a new version of its web browser which it claims offers “faster and better browsing experience”.
The Opera 41 has a number of improvements, both in terms of speed as well as usability. Notable among them is the smarter startup sequences that loads the browser swiftly despite the many tabs it contains.
By default Opera’s browser starts where you left off. But sometimes the browser crashes or loads incredibly slow when resuming the previous session. With the new startup sequence, Opera said the browser will start up faster by prioritizing the most important of the tabs.
The improvement will ensure the most recently active tab and any pinned tabs will load first, before the rest. This tweak alone has resulted in average improvement of 86% when testing startup time with more than 42 tabs open in previous session.
Additional features include VPN, native ad-blocker, battery saver and video pop-out. Also, for those requiring longer battery time when video conferencing, Opera now detects which video codec can be hardware-accelerated and tries to choose that codec. This will supposedly save a lot of CPU and battery.
Another issue resolved in the latest version is the video pop-out which was leading to extensive CPU usage on low-end computers.
“With Opera 41, you get a fully hardware-accelerated video pop-out. This should greatly limit the need for CPU support and free your PC resources for other things while you watch your favorite movies. The test results show up to 30% less CPU usage after this change,” Opera stated in a blog post on Tuesday.
If you have been using the personalized newsreader, Opera has brought new enhancements to the feature as well, allowing to add a source even if the user doesn’t know the exact RSS URL, history navigation, among others.
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