Opera

Smart TVs have become all the rage, bringing the world of apps into the living room. But other devices, like Blu-ray players and set-top boxes, can do the same thing. Now TiVo, a pioneer in the DVR field, is partnering with Opera to bring its app store to customers.

This isn’t for all TiVo users, only for those on US cable service RCN. Opera, largely known as a Norwegian browser maker, is one of the biggest forces in the smart TV business, maintaining an app store it licenses to device makers.

Opera Software has announced Opera 20′s debut in the Next stream. There’s no revolution this time, perhaps fortunately, but the new build does bring some small but welcome improvements.

A tiny 804KB network installer for Windows grabs the latest version from Opera’s servers, retries the download as required, looks for security issues and starts the installation. The regular offline installer will also remain available, though, and that’s what you’ll see if you download Opera 20 right now.

YouTube, like many other websites, undergoes changes, and it has taken on a number of guises over the years. Some looks have lasted for a long time, while others have been shorter lived. There are also experimental looks, not all of which end up being released, but even when a redesign is rolled out, it can take a while to make its way around the world. Currently in the experimental stage is a center-aligned layout which includes a cleaned up interface a new menu and a few other tweaks.

In the new design, a top navigation bar is now locked to the top of the screen, remaining in place while the rest of the page scrolls. There is a customizable carousel and a new Upload button encourages visitors into sharing. It's not yet clear quite when this new interface will be officially released to a waiting world, but it's something you can enable now; all it takes is a quick cookie tweak.

Opera Software has released Opera 19.0 FINAL, the fifth major update of its web browser since it was rebooted last July as a Chromium-based browser and entered a rapid release development cycle.

Version 19 introduces four notable new features, including the long-awaited return of the Bookmarks bar as well as support for custom wallpapers, improvements to its extensions handling and a new Hardcore mode for advanced users.

You may only think of Opera as a web browser, an alternative to the bigger players like Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but the company does a lot more. In fact, the Norwegian browser maker is invested heavily in the entertainment market.

Today Opera announces it has reached a deal to bring its TV Store to select Samsung Blu-ray players, adding hundreds of apps to the living room.

Opera Software has announced that Coast, its iPad web browser, has been updated to version 2.0.

New audio support means that this release can play music directly, without requiring an extra app. There are more ways to customize your Coast wallpaper. As well as setting it to your preferred web image, you can point the program at one of eight bundled backgrounds, or use an image from your photo roll. Just long press the home screen and choose whatever you need.

Opera Software has released Opera 18 for Android, a major redesign with every aspect of the browser interface being optimized for larger Android tablets.

"We poured a great deal of thought into the Opera for Android tablet version," says Johan Schön, SVP for Mobile Consumer Browsers, Opera Software. "The size of devices and mindset of users make the tablet very different from its smaller cousin, the smartphone, and we have to respect that. In Opera 18 for Android, we have spent hours and hours tweaking, and fiddling with the placement of, even the most minute detail, just to get that top tablet feel".

Opera Software has unveiled Opera 18, an interesting update which sees the browser gain new multimedia support, easier tab handling, speedy search engine creation, and more.

This starts with getUserMedia and webRTC-based support for your camera and microphone, which means sites can implement advanced features like video conferencing without the need for plugins.

Opera Software has announced the release of Opera 17.0 FINAL, an interesting build which includes several small but worthwhile new features. Top of the list is a new "pinned" tab option.

If you have a few tabs which you need to stay open, just right-click them and select "Pin tab". The tabs will be reduced to the size of the page icon (handy if you are running short on space), and you will not be able to close them accidentally.

When it comes to the humble web browser, the fundamentals haven’t changed an awful lot over the years. Even when porting the browser to a tablet, developers have traditionally steered a conservative line and have either scaled up a mobile browser or attempted to replicate the desktop interface in a touchscreen environment.

For those who find web browsing on the iPad more fiddly than it should be, rejoice: Opera Software has attempted to reinvent the tablet browser with the release of Coast by Opera.

Opera Software today announces the release of Opera 16.0 FINAL.

As you might expect, the new rapid release cycle means that major changes are in short supply, but look closely and there are one or two interesting additions to be found.

Norwegian browser developer Opera Software has confirmed the switch of its browser development to a rapid release cycle with the launch of Opera Next 16. The new version number comes less than a month after Opera 15 FINAL was released, which saw Opera switch from its own proprietary Presto web engine to the Blink engine used by Google Chrome.

As with all rapid release cycle updates, there are no major overhauls to be found in Opera Next 16, although a number of interesting new features have been showcased as the next iteration starts its journey towards final release.

The rebooting of Opera 15.0 saw the niche browser switch to a new rendering engine, adopting Chrome’s Blink in favor of its own proprietary Presto engine. In restarting the browser from scratch, Opera has opted not to include a lot of popular functionality from previous versions -- some of this is temporary, while others (specifically bookmarks) could be permanently lost.

One way of restoring some functionality is through extensions, small programs written in HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Opera has its own Extensions store, but the great news for early adopters of Opera 15 is that -- with the aptly titled Chrome Extension for Opera 2.0 installed -- you can use Google Chrome Extensions too.

Norwegian browser developer Opera has teamed up with video sharing site Dailymotion to create a new service that can transform any Dailymotion video channel into a Smart TV application in less than a minute.

Opera TV Snap lets you convert an existing online video channel into a ready-to-run HTML5 app for inclusion in the Opera TV Store, a Smart TV app storefront supported by major television and set-top-box manufacturers.

Opera Software made a bold move earlier this year when the company announced that it would use WebKit as its rendering engine and V8 as the JavaScript engine for all new products. Later on it revealed that it would follow Google and use the Blink Fork instead of WebKit, but that did not change the explosiveness of the move.

It took the Norwegian company five months to release the first final version of Opera for PCs that is powered by the new engines. While that seems like a long time for users who wanted to find out how the change would affect them personally, the development time is not that long.