Opera 39 stable, based on Chromium 52 has been released and available for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. Opera 39 introduces personalized newsreader, reduces memory usage in Opera used Blink-engine with heap compaction.
Personal News feed
Like it or hate it! Opera desktop has added personal news (PN) (Opera calls it Personalized newsreader) to speed dial. To get started, open the start page and click on News icon, PN based on your browsing history and location, shows suggested stories. FYI, Personal News has got RSS feed support in Opera 40.
READ: Opera launches Personal News Feed
Video pop-out improvements
Video pop out introduced in Opera 38 has been improved in this version: got support for more websites, ‘including vimeo, with play/pause with a single click’. You can now disable this feature if you want, visit Settings >Websites > Video pop out, uncheck Enable video pop out.
Disable Opera’s Video Pop Out Feature
Search popup; useful or annoyance?
Inspired from mobile platforms, Opera has introduced search popup in version 40, this is now available in this version, which shows search or copy popup when you select text. If you found it annoying and interrupting your user experience with websites you can disable it by visiting settings >User Interface.
Memory Improvements landed
Opera Blink team said in this in a blog post: “Two weeks ago we released the beta version of Opera 39, and it is time to mention one of its improvements: heap compaction, an optimization pass for the Blink memory manager. It reduces memory usage by several megabytes per tab when browsing popular websites”.
If you’re an end user, forget about technical info! Realize this: memory usage in this Opera version will be reduced by several megabytes per tab when browsing popular sites.
If the site uses lot of DOM and few images and script data, then percentage of memory savings will be significant, but this doesn’t applies to a site you visit in Opera browser which has more images and scripts, Opera still has a lot of work to do on this.
Don’t think these memory improvements have landed in Chrome or Chromium, not at all! Opera folks will work with Google guys to apply these to Blink project soon.
For more information, check this blog post.