Bookmarks Manager enabled in Opera 25

When Opera Software switched from the company's own Presto rendering engine to Chromium/Blink, part of the browser's userbase criticized the company for it.

Among the points the community made was that the new Opera lacked many features of the old Opera browser such as proper bookmarking support.

Browser extensions were created shortly thereafter by the community to add bookmarking support to the browser but it took Opera Software more than a year to integrate a native bookmarks manager into Opera.

It launched with Opera Developer 24 in July 2014 but had to be activated back then on the opera://flags page before it became available.

In the most recent version of Opera Developer 25, the bookmarks manager has finally been enabled by default which means that users of the browser can make use of it directly.

You can access bookmarks with a click on the Opera button in the main interface. Here you find options to show all bookmarks, and to quickly access all existing bookmarks directly.

All bookmarks that you have added to Opera or imported from other browsers are displayed here so that you can load them directly using the menu.

The show all bookmarks link, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-b or loading opera://boookmarks directly open the manager in the web browser.

It lists all folders on the left with options to create new folders. Here you find the bookmarks bar listed as well so that you can drag and drop bookmarks from and to it easily.

Opera supports two different display modes for bookmarks. It can display them as text lines that highlight the name of the page/domain and address, or as thumbnail images instead.

Both the integrated search and the dragging & dropping of bookmarks works really well.

New bookmarks can be added in several ways. You can use the Ctrl-d shortcut to add the active page to the bookmarks, or drag & drop bookmarks to the bookmarks bar to save them there directly.

Once you start using the new bookmarks options, you will notice that several features are still amiss. It is for instance not possible to delete folders once they have been created, and since it is not possible to move folders into other folders, you may end up with a selection of empty folders that clutter your sidebar.

Other options that are missing at the time of writing is a recycle bin or an undo feature at the very least to undo accidental deletes, options to move multiple bookmarks at the same time, or an option to display the list of bookmarks in a persistent sidebar.

Considering that the feature has been integrated into a Developer version of Opera, it is too early to criticize Opera Software for the missing features. It will take several months before Opera Stable hits version 25 and it is likely that the company will improve the bookmarks manager in that time.