Opera releases new version with better window manager

The company behind Opera has released version 21 of the web browser, which uses Chrome’s window manager on Windows. Under OS X, Opera 21 uses a similar framework from Apple.

Version 21 of the browser was already available as beta for some time, but Opera has now released the final version. Opera 21 introduces a new window manager on Windows, Aura, which is also already used in Chrome. According to Opera, Aura offers better hardware acceleration than the window manager used up to version 20. On OS X, Opera 21 uses Apple’s Core Animation framework, which the browser maker claims offers the same benefits.

Opera has also added a feature that makes it possible to display the entire URL in the address bar again. By default, Opera shows a simplified URL, omitting the ‘http://’ protocol indicator, for example. For example, Google URLs are also simplified. If you want to, you can now disable that option. According to Opera, this is a function that is often requested.

Opera, which is based on the same code as Google Chrome, has been further updated to a newer version of Chromium so that web standards should be better supported. The browser also scales better on screens that are set to 200% dpi.