Opera 33 Stable brings Opera Turbo 2 support

What's happening over at Opera Software? Apart from suggestions that the company is up for grabs should a serious bidder emerge, business as usual.

Opera Software, which abandoned classic Opera some time ago in favor of Chromium/Blink, has released Opera 33 Stable to the public.

The Opera 33 changelog is long and you will find mostly bug fixes and gradual improvements in it. If you take the time to go through it however, you will notice a couple of feature additions that improve the browser significantly.

Probably the biggest in Opera 33 is support for Opera Turbo 2. The improved version of the compression proxy improves site compatibility, performance and compression in comparison to the old version.

Opera Turbo is part of desktop and mobile versions of the Opera web browser, and available as a standalone application called Opera Max.

It tunnels regular HTTP traffic through Opera servers before it reaches the user's device. There, it compresses the data before it is sent on its way which improves the loading time of web pages due to the smaller size of the data sent on its way.

It is unclear right now if Opera Turbo 2 supports media compression that Opera introduced in Opera Max recently.

Other changes introduced in Opera 33 are support for mp3 and H.264 out of the box. This should improve  HTML5 video compatibility significantly. If you check YouTube's HTML5 test page for instance, you will notice that all six features tested on the page are supported by Opera 33. Opera 33 detects if the chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra package is installed on Linux systems and will make use of it automatically provided that it is up to date.

The underlying Chromium/Blink version has been updated to version 46, and there is a new option to set up sites as handlers for specific link types (e.g. make an email service the default handler for mailto: links that you click on in the Opera web browser).

You find the new handlers option in the Opera Settings under Privacy & Security.

Version 33 of Opera is the first stable version that ships with the new Opera branding.

Interested users can download the new Opera version from the official website. If you are already running Opera on your system, you may check for updates with a click on Opera > About Opera.

Closing Words

Some say that Opera's new browser is finally starting to show real promise while others are still disillusioned and have little hope that the new Opera will be as great as the old functionality-wise, and that Opera Software has turned into an advertising company.

What's your take on the matter?