Here’s a fresh update of our Developer stream, available for you. It contains some improvements, and bug fixes.

Power saver mode – phase 2

Progressive timer throttling. Timers are throttling a little bit to start with, and then increased after a 10s delay. This affects background tabs, both with and without power save mode. Without power save mode, we throttle to 10s after the delay, and with power save mode to 30s.

Timers originating from cross-origin iframes, are now throttled in foreground frames. These are throttled to 1s at first, and 10s after the delay. This is mostly targeted at ads, but might affect other use cases.

Personal news

As you can see in the change log, this team is not wasting time! Many changes, and bug fixes are listed there. All to improve the experience with your own, personal news.

\m/ :cheers:

Since the upgrade to 39.02245.0 my Opera Developer won't function anymore in Sandboxie. It does function fine outside of the Sandbox though.

Hope you can get it fixed asap.

Kind regards,
Peter

Custom ad-blocking rules
Since we introduced native ad blocker, we have got a lot of requests to have a possibility to add custom lists. First we introduced an option to load them from a local file, today we add functionality to load it from any URL. Just make sure you have advanced settings turned on, then in the “Custom block lists…” dialog you can add any address, which contains ad-blocking rules in EasyList format.
Usually, such files contain modification date as well as the update frequency. These values determine how often the list will be automatically updated. If the list definition says that the list expires in 4 days, that means it will be updated every 4 days starting from the last modification date mentioned in the document.

This looks somewhat broken. My localised list (is it in correct format? I don't know) doesn't seem to have modification date and update frequency included; when I load it from disk, everything is well, but using url (http://gurud.ee/ab.txt) makes Opera to push CPU at 33% or 50% load constantly (i5 here). No activity is seen in Opera task manager.

In the previous release comments, you have reported general slowness when browsing with the ad-blocking feature on. This has been fixed – please check out the newest version and let us know if everything is OK for you.

Seems to be fixed, thanks a lot

The change log, and the announcement.

"In the latest version of Opera 39 developer, we’re bringing you new functionality in the personal news feed, and a much wanted global preference for browser VPN.

Personal news

We’ve continued our work on personal news, one-stop news tailored just for you. There are various improvements and tweaks waiting for you to try out, including updated layout, the option to remove suggested sites and a better way to add and remove sources.

This update also introduces a new top 50 stories feature. This gives you top picks for a selected country and is a nice way to look for inspirations or interesting articles to read. This top 50 content is separated from your personal feed, but you can easily add sources you like from it to your personal feed.

Opera’s service, which powers the personal news feed, checks over 10,000 news sources to find trending and interesting articles from different categories and countries. Various aspects are taken into account before article or piece of news gets on the list, such as popularity among users, including hot topics (e.g., important sport events), freshness and website popularity. We also try hard to balance different articles and source, so single news or site will not dominate the whole list. You can expect mostly news, sports and entertainment along with interesting stories from other categories.

We’re still developing the feature so keep an eye on following updates. Also keep the comments coming they are very helpful for us.

Custom ad-blocking rules

Since we introduced native ad blocker, we have got a lot of requests to have a possibility to add custom lists. First we introduced an option to load them from a local file, today we add functionality to load it from any URL. Just make sure you have advanced settings turned on, then in the “Custom block lists…” dialog you can add any address, which contains ad-blocking rules in EasyList format.

Usually, such files contain modification date as well as the update frequency. These values determine how often the list will be automatically updated. If the list definition says that the list expires in 4 days, that means it will be updated every 4 days starting from the last modification date mentioned in the document.

Browser VPN back as browser preference

Thank you very much for the feedback about how you’ve been using VPN. We also promised, that we are going to offer both functionalities: a full browser VPN and a separate one that works within a private window only. This release contains them both, and we would appreciate your feedback on this improvement, too!

Other info

In the previous release comments, you have reported general slowness when browsing with the ad-blocking feature on. This has been fixed – please check out the newest version and let us know if everything is OK for you.

Chromium has been updated to 52.0.2739.0.

Known issues:

– VPN badge is always visible. It is a bug, and we are going to fix it, so you will be able to tune it in preferences.

– Source labels in personal news are sometimes misplaced.

– Top 50 has hiccups and doesn’t show anything in some countries.

– Top 50 shows news according to language selected in the catalog.

– A number of strings is not localized."

\m/ :cheers:

Not working how?

Open new private window, VPN shows blue and enabled.

Try to go to any site, shows "Sending request to <url>..."

Eventually times out. Same for all four VPN Virtual locations.

Worked perfectly prior to this build.

VPN is not working in 39.0.2234.0

Not working how?

The change log, and the announcement: Introducing a smarter, more personal news feed in Opera.

"Today, we want to show you another feature to try out in the developer channel for Opera for computers. It’s a personal news feed, one-stop news tailored just for you – from all over the world, your country, or your favorite news source, just as you like.

People really need new tools for news

Reading news is one of the things the web is great for. The number of people looking for online news, has been constantly growing during last years. There is an almost endless amount of news out there, and you only need to find a link to discover new, exciting parts of the web.

Our research in this area found that, while many people love reading news on the web, the amount of news stories could be overwhelming to them. They were truly suffering from information overload. The more news sources people found, the less they felt they were capable of keeping up with the news.

We found out that you are looking for a solution, that:

- Gathers your favorite sources, and only your favorite sources, in one place.
- Is clean, minimalistic and readable.

- Unlike on social networks, allows you to be in charge of what you see in you feed (If there’s anything, you’d like to remove from there, you should be able to do it easily).

- Displays news on a structured timeline, so it’s easy to go back to stories published earlier.

- Enables mixing sources from different regions, as many of you read websites in two or even more languages.

- Is smart enough to automatically include publications you visit frequently.

That’s quite a few expectations, right? But, we found these insights very helpful and began building a news feed solution that matches up to our users’ needs. We started with re-doing what we had – the news feature, previously called Discover. We decided to power it up, adding more personalization, convenient reading and smarter options.

How it works

Today, we can show you the first preview of the personalized news feed, which gives you a quick, organized, clean way of following the freshest stories from the web. To start using it, go to the start page and click the newspaper icon on the left. Opera will show you the suggested list of sources based on your location and your browser history. Your browser history data will be kept locally, so it will not leave your computer (any private browsing is not included, since that browser history is not recorded).

Simply tick the suggested sources that you want to follow in your personal news feed, and untick ones you don’t want to be included. Click the “Add more” button to add more sources from several categories such as sports, technology or food. You can also mix sources from various countries.

Your personal news feed is structured on a timeline. At the top, you will find the freshest stories, while news published earlier today and yesterday are listed below. You can easily change the way sources are displayed by clicking the icon on the top. Whenever you want to add new sources, just go to the side panel and click “Add sources”.

Share your feedback

As you can see, our personal news feed is much more than just a new incarnation of the previous news feature. It gives you many more personalization options and gathers content for you in a smarter way. It’s a first step towards a better, online news-reading experience.

Please help us improve this feature by sharing your feedback. We are very interested in what you think about this feature.

Browser VPN – the next steps

Thank you very much for your feedback, following the latest browser VPN release in the Developer version. We hear it, and we value it a lot.

We see three main patterns people would like to use browser VPN for: the full browser level VPN, a separate window (or a tab) and private window. That reflects situations, when we are on a public WiFi, and we want to protect everything we browse online. Also when you want to access only a few different websites, while keeping your other tabs at full browsing speed. Last but not least, when you want to enhance your external privacy, not only clear local traces (history and cookies). So we are going to polish the first and third use cases a little bit more to provide rock solid quality. However, we need to admit that current Blink implementation has too many assumptions about how regular window and private window work, so the second scenario will require additional effort.

Please keep providing us your feedback, so we can improve our product."

\m/ :cheers:

doesn't it work on win xp?

Nope. Last version with support for XP is 36.

Now, only if I could find out why my Opera browser VPN mode is stuck in a "Connecting" loop while I am at work. Is it possible that my company uses a VPN already and it will not connect? Possibly a port blocked? Hmmm.....