Opera 26 introduces bookmarks sharing and tab syncing

If you want to know what is in store for the Opera browser next in terms of functionality and changes, you have to check out the Developer version of the web browser to do so.

It is two versions ahead usually which means that both Beta and Stable users of the browser won't have access to those features for several weeks.

Opera Developer has been moved to version 26 today and with it comes the new Bookmarks sharing feature. As you may know, the company introduced a full bookmarks manager in Opera 25 recently after more than a year of including no such option in Opera.

Note: You need to update Opera Developer first or download a new copy of it from the Opera website to make use of the new sharing functionality. You find all recent download links listed in the sidebar here on this page. If you do not know which version of Opera you are running, load opera://about/ in the address bar to find out.

When you open the Bookmarks Manager in Opera 26, you will notice a new share button at the top right.  A click on the button opens a share dialog in an overlay. Here you can change the name of what you want to share and create a link to share it.

The selected bookmarks folder is published on the Opera website when you hit the share button a second time. Please note that the information are publicly accessible and only obfuscated by the url.

It is interesting to note that the lifetime of the shares is limited to 14 days and that you can manage all shares from within Opera. The functionality to delete or extend the share has not been built-in yet apparently but the menu is already there so that you know that the functionality will become available eventually.

You can copy the link pointing to those bookmarks to share it with others, for instance via email, chat clients or publicly on sites such as Twitter or Facebook.

There is however no option to share it directly, for instance by clicking on a button in the share menu to add it to a new email message on the local system.

As far as other changes in Opera 26 are concerned, there are some. You can set the flag opera://flags/#sync-tabs to enabled to enable the syncing of open tabs in the browser (still not ready for prime time though), opera://flags/#tab-menu to display a new button to list all open tabs, and opera://flags/#bookmarks-sharing to disable the bookmark sharing functionality.