Opera 86 dev channel update adds support for horizontal tab scrolling

The latest version in the Dev channel of Opera browser, version 86, adds a new way to navigate through your tabs. This maybe useful for users who are in the habit of hoarding dozens of tabs.

Horizontal tab scrolling in Opera browser

The feature, called Horizontal tab scrolling, places an arrow button at either end of the tab bar, clicking on which takes you to the left or the right of the list respectively.  Opera's tab bar, unlike that of other browsers, keeps resizing the size of tabs dynamically, as you open more and more tabs. This makes it difficult to find a particular tab, which is why the new feature could be useful. But at this point, I think the Search Tabs panel is still the better way to manage tabs.

Now, when you update to the latest version, you may think that the horizontal tab scrolling doesn't work. Firefox has a similar feature (mouse wheel gesture) which kicks in when you have 25 tabs or more. Since I'm used to it, I guessed Opera has a similar requirement, so I kept opening more tabs. Opera doesn't display the arrow buttons for tab scrolling until the entire tab bar is filled, I had to open 54 tabs for the icons to appear on my 1080p monitor.

The horizontal tab scrolling is enabled by default. You can't disable the feature directly from the browser's settings, but you can toggle a preference from the opera:flags page. Look for the flag that is labeled "Scrollable tab strip", click on the drop-down menu next to it and select the Disabled option.

Users who are on the stable channel of the browser can enable the above-mentioned setting, to try the horizontal tab scrolling without installing the dev channel build.

Hide tabs from the same website

Another change that the latest version of Opera brings, is the ability to hide the list of tabs from the same website in the tooltip that pops-up when you mouse over a tab. To disable the list, head to the Settings > Advanced > User interface > and toggle the switch next to "Show tabs from the same domain in tab tooltip".

New Snapshot tools in Opera browser

Opera added a couple of new options for its Snapshot tools last week. The first new option is a crop tool that can be accessed from the snapshot editor that appears after you capture a screenshot. It's pretty much similar to the crop tool that you may have used in image editors, i.e., resize the rectangle by dragging its borders.

The other change lets you capture a Snapshot by selecting text, you'll need to highlight a minimum of 3 words, after which the "Snapshot" button appears in the pop-up panel. It acts as a shortcut to save the snapshot, so you can either copy the text or save it as an image.

You can download Opera 86 for Windows, macOS and Linux from the official website.

The horizontal tab scrolling is a nice feature to have, but I feel that the implementation could have been better. I prefer scrolling through the tabs with the mouse wheel, a feature that the application doesn't have yet. But given that Opera browser has been a pioneer in mouse gestures, I think we can expect it to be added in the future.

Opera 86 dev channel update adds support for horizontal tab scrolling