Opera 41 is now out in the wild, and the latest version of the browser packs a big improvement in terms of start-up time. The team at Opera Software has come up with a clever way of ensuring that users see the content they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
It has long been the norm for the Opera browser to initialize with the same tabs that were active when the software was last in use. This feature is great when you want to dive straight back into a task — but loading all the tabs that were previously open can slow down the start-up process considerably.
Opera 41 claims to make this process “smarter” by deciding which tabs open first. The most recently active tab and any pinned tabs will be prioritized over other active tabs, which the development team claims will make them seem to open immediately, according to a blog post on the Opera website.
Test results demonstrated an average improvement of 86 percent between Opera 40 and 41, when more that 42 tabs were open in the previous session. When around ten tabs were open, there was still a speed gain of more that 50 percent.
The new version of Opera also offers improvements to battery life while video-conferencing. While in battery-saving mode, the browser will now attempt to find and select a video codec that can utilize hardware acceleration — if it fails to do so, it can try and limit the pixel count to reduce CPU usage.
Support for hardware acceleration has also been added to the browser’s video pop-out options, which were introduced in May 2016. There’s also a host of new improvements to Opera’s personalized newsreader functionality.
Opera 41 is available now from the Opera website, while existing users will see an auto-update prompt in the browser.
