Opera Brings Easy Bookmark Sharing To Its Desktop Browser

Opera launched version 26 of its desktop browser today. The marquee feature of this new version is bookmark sharing. Say you are doing some research for your next vacation and you've bookmarked a couple of potential all-inclusive resorts in Los Cabos, how do you easily share those with your friends? With Opera 26, you now simply click the share button and Opera will make those items available through a private link.

All of this looks quite a bit like Google's new bookmarking tool in Chrome. The new Chrome bookmark manager, too, allows you to easily share your links with others (though I don't think I've ever been able to make that work). While Opera uses Google's Blink rendering engine, bookmarking isn't a feature that the rendering engine handles, so it's a bit of a surprise to see both of them launch what is essentially the same feature. Opera launched its first iteration of its visual bookmarking tool with the release of Opera 25 in October.

Another new feature in today's release is built-in print preview. Opera - just like any other browser - used to have this capability before it switched to WebKit. Much to some of its users dismay, it dropped this and a couple of other features during the switch, but it is now gradually restoring many of them.

With this update, Opera is also bringing its Linux version to the stable release channel, so everybody on that platform will now get the same features as Windows and Mac users.