New Opera Version Paves The Way For Windows 64 Bit Builds

A new beta version of the Opera browser was released to the public and it includes several improvements. Its CPU usage is down by 30% when using the video pop-out functionality, battery consumption was reduced by 30% during video conferences and the browser starts up 48% faster. If you haven’t installed Opera 41 beta yet, download the file from Opera Software’s official page.

If you didn’t know, Opera shares much of its code with Google’s Chrome browser. So while Firefox loads only the active tab on start, Chrome loads all open tabs, which is an issue when trying to open 20-30 tabs open. On the other hand, Opera 41 will prioritize active tab and pinned tabs and the start of the rest of tabs will be delayed, and this led to a reduction of the browser start time by 48%. The good news is that you can disable the lazy loading or delayed loading of background tabs by following these steps:

Type opera://settings/ in the address bar;
On the left you will select Browser;
Scroll down until you see “show advanced settings” and click on it to enable it;
Head back to Basic;
Uncheck “delay loading of background tabs”.

Opera Software also made Video Conferencing improvements and battery time is extended by 30%. Hardware acceleration kicks in when enabling Battery Saver mode, but for users who want to disable hardware acceleration, you can do this:

Loading opera://settings/ in the address bar;
Switching to the Browser section;
Scrolling down until you find System;
Unchecking “Use hardware acceleration when available”.

Personal News, the RSS/news reader introduced in May was also improved, allowing users to add sources even if they don’t know the exact RSS URL. Soon, a Windows 64-bit version of Opera Stable will be released, but after that the browser will reach version 42.