Opera 43: better performance, classic link selection

Opera Software has just released Opera 43 to the Stable channel introducing performance improvements and classic Opera's link selection method to the browser.

The three new features that Opera Software highlights in the new release are instant page loading, PGO for Windows, and classic link selection.

You can download the new Opera 43.0 from the Opera website, or use the browser's automatic update feature instead. Type opera://about in the address bar and hit enter to run a manual check for updates. The new version should be picked up and installed automatically at this point then. Please note that a restart is required to complete the process.

Opera 43: What's new

Classic link selection is probably the easiest to explain. Basically, what it allows you to do is highlight part or all of a link's text better.

Sometimes when you try to highlight link text to copy it, your action is accidentally recognized by the browser as a click. Since you hold down the mouse button to highlight the text of the link, you end up doing a link dragging action instead of the highlighting action that you intended to to.

With the new classic link feature implemented, this cannot happen anymore as long as you move the mouse cursor horizontally. To drag the link instead, move the cursor vertically instead.

Instant Page Loading

Instant Page Loading, or speculative prerenderer is not an entirely new feature. Opera notes that the feature may shave off up to a second of page loading times.

We have looked at the feature back when speculative prerenderer was first announced by Opera. Basically, what it does is try to predict the link that you will open. Opera preloads the page or service, so that it loads faster when you click on it.

The downside to this is that it wastes resources if you don't click on that link. Also, it may be problematic from a privacy point of view as sites are contacted without user action.

You can disable prerendering in Opera. check out the linked article for instructions on how to do so.

PGO on Windows

Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) improves the browser startup, page load and new tab page load time. Opera states that browser start is 13% faster, and benchmark results benefit from this as well.

Google, which started to use PGO for Chrome recently as well, stated that Chrome's startup improved by 16%, and the browser's new page load time and new tab page load time by 5% and 14% respectively.

Closing Words

The bookmark export feature that Opera wanted to introduce in Opera 43 did not make it in the release. Native Chromecast support however is available, but disabled by default.

To enable it load opera://flags/?search=media in the browser's address bar and switch the Media Router preference to enabled, and restart Opera afterwards.

The full changelog is provided on the Opera website. It lists hundreds of fixes, changes and improvements.