14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 15 has been available in the stable channel for a few days now. The next-generation Opera is based on Chromium/Chrome, but comes with some modifications and additions.
The UI layer has been rewritten, for example, to take advantage of native libraries. Google, on the other hand, is moving away from native libraries and writing its own UI stack.
But the changes also mean several missing features compared to the old Opera and even to Chrome. One of the things people are missing the most are bookmarks.
Technically speaking, there are no bookmarks in the new Opera. Chrome itself does support them, so Opera's decision was a conscious one – it wanted bookmarks gone because it believes it has something better.
In fact, it's something that's been around for a while, namely the Speed Dial. The reworked speed dial is a lot more powerful and flexible than the one in the old Opera 12. You can now add an unlimited number of entries and even create groups.
These two features, Opera believes, are enough for Speed Dial to become a good-enough bookmark replacement.
"When you save your preferred pages in Speed Dial, you have a visual bookmarking system," the dev explains.
"You can group your Speed Dials using folders. Simply drag and drop one Speed Dial button on top of another, and it will create a folder. You can also quickly filter items on your Speed Dial by clicking the search icon in the upper-right corner," it adds.
To drive the point home, the new browser version supports bookmark migration. It's a mostly automated process, as your bookmarks can be converted to Speed Dial entries when you upgrade to the new Opera, if you wish.
But for those who preferred the old way of doing things, Opera has created a browser extension, aptly named "Bookmark Manager," that aims to emulate the old way of doing things, within the constraints of a Chrome/Opera extension.
