Review: Opera 15 browser for Mac sells its soul for speed and slickness
Opera used to burst with somewhat odd but charmingly ambitious features it almost certainly didn’t need. The browser’s last major release, Opera 12, took a welcome step away from all that clutter, while keeping a handful of innovations and all of its charm. By replacing its home-brewed rendering engine with a mélange of Chromium and WebKit, Opera 15 has now gotten slightly better at keeping pace with rival browsers—but it also feels bland and anonymous, a Stepford-wife version of its former self.
A revamped Speed Dial page is also now the only way you can get to your bookmarks.
A sleek surface, just like everyone else’s
Unlike browsers from Yandex or Maxthon, this isn’t some hasty reskinning of Google Chrome. Opera’s designers have taken pains to give the browser a curvy, metallic look that’s nothing like Chrome, and at least somewhat distinct from Safari or Firefox.
Opera 15 has also made notable improvements to Speed Dial, the palette of favored pages that appears when you open a new tab. It’s now easier than ever to reshuffle those pages or combine them into groups, which pop up in a scrollable subpane of webpage thumbnails. But though this looks great, it doesn’t let you see all the sites you’ve saved in a group at the same time—just however many can fit in the current view.
A heart icon (the Stash feature) in the new combined URL and search bar lets you save a page in Speed Dial for later reading—a more visually appealing version of Safari’s Reading List. And a Discover option under Speed Dial summons an array of recent news stories, customizable by region or subject matter. Opera 15 does a much better job of culling worthwhile stories than do browsers like Sleipnir 4.
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