14 DAY TRIAL // When the new Chrome/Chromium-based Opera came out, the browser maker wanted to highlight all the new things, like the revamped speed dial or the new stash feature. But, unsurprisingly, most users focused on the things that were missing, and there were many of them.
Perhaps the biggest missing feature in the eyes of the fans (or at least the vocal ones) was bookmarks. Opera found that only a very small number of people actually used bookmarks in the old browser and, among the ones that did, most were simply using the feature to temporarily store a site they wanted to get back to later.
This is why it decided to remove bookmarks altogether and replace the feature's functionality with a combination of the new speed dial and the stash.
But it didn't work out that way, people were furious that their carefully curated bookmarks, thousands of them added over the years, were now useless.
Thankfully, Opera did listen to the critics and eventually decided to bring back bookmarks in some form. In fact, bookmarks are finally part of Opera 17 Next and Opera 18 Developer by default.
The new Quick Access Bar, essentially the bookmarks bar found in most other browsers, is now available by default in the testing versions of the new Opera. You still have to enable it from the settings, but you don't have to turn on the flag that controls it anymore.
For bookmark power users though, there's not much to celebrate yet. That's because the new Opera only brings back the bookmarks bar, but not a full-blown bookmark manager. The bar is good for storing a few sites, maybe a dozen or more, but certainly not hundreds or thousands.
It's also unlikely that Opera will bring back a full bookmark manager. The quick access bar is a favor to fans, but it's probably one of the few. By now, people have gotten used to the bookmark-less Opera or moved on to other browsers.