14 DAY TRIAL // While Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft Edge are currently the most popular browsers on the market, there are at least two more alternatives that come with feature lineups worth checking out.
These are Vivaldi and Opera, both of which receive updates regularly, and the latter has just been refreshed with a couple of major improvements.
Opera 57 is now available for download on all supported desktop platforms, and this time the developing team has focused specifically on improving the experience right on the start page.
If you’ve been following Opera’s work lately, the company has tried to make the initial interaction with the browser as straightforward as possible, providing you with a series of tools that let you search for information and perform certain tasks, like searching, quite easily.
This new version introduces two different improvements that users who aren’t looking for a typical browsing experience are going to like: smart news and Netflix recommendations.
First and foremost, the browser now integrates an AI-drive news selection algorithm, so Opera always picks the articles that are more relevant to your settings.
Each story comes with like and dislike buttons, and these are very important for how the browser delivers more articles to you. Every time you press the like button, Opera has the article in mind to provide you more relevant stories in the future, while disliking an article means you would no longer get similar pages in the future.
The news page, which is available right in the speed dial in the lower part of the screen, is supposed to offer a truly personalized experience, so all topics are based purely on what you like.
You can customize pretty much anything, including sections that you’d like to follow, different languages, and even sources. Furthermore, you can mix these options to enhance the news reading process. If you’re based in a foreign country but speak English, you can very well choose to see articles in multiple languages, and all articles would be displayed on the same page.
Once you click a specific story, Opera automatically launches it in a dedicated tab and takes you to the website where the full text is available. You can also configure how often the news page to be refreshed from the browser settings screen.
Additionally, with this update Opera introduces Netflix recommendations, which is an engine that makes suggestions of how to watch and then lets you add the video to your Netflix queue.
This obviously requires you to have a Netflix account and be logged in, so the more you use the start page in Opera, the more recommendation you are going to receive. This feature, however, is only available in select countries, but Opera says it’s working to expand it to more.
“Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czechia, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, the United Kingdom and the United States,” are currently supported.
Needless to say, both the news experience and the Netflix recommendations can be blocked from the settings screen of the browser, so you can customize it in any way you like.
Whether these improvements are going to increase the market share of Opera remains to be seen, but what’s for sure is that they make it a lot easier to stay up-to-date with news related to certain topics without even opening a single tab.
All these new features are available right now in the latest Opera release for supported desktop platforms, including Windows, Linux, and macOS.