Opera GX now comes with Panic Button to quickly hide the monkey business on your screen

In a recent study by Opera, every third user of its gaming-oriented Opera GX browser admitted to accessing inappropriate content while at school, college, or work, and even more (45%) have done so at home.

While 78% of the 2,200 respondents faced only embarrassment, in 13% of cases, the situation resulted in a break-up or even divorce. Now, the Oslo-based developer comes with an interesting solution dubbed Panic Button.

The feature aims for higher privacy in situations where you are doing something you are not supposed to do right now, or at all. Did your boss unexpectedly enter the office while playing Minecraft? Or did your mother enter the room while, for instance, playing Minecraft?

The solution is pretty straightforward and according to Opera it works as follows: “You can quickly hit the F12 key and the Panic Button is activated. This quickly mutes and pauses playback from all tabs and forces open a new window of totally bland, ‘safe’ content, keeping your secrets safe for another day. To restore all tabs to the previous state you just need to press the F12 button again.”

Opera labels this feature “a first line of defense”. It comes with a pre-defined list of safe websites like Wikipedia. The user can also configure their own bland websites to act innocent when surprised by an unexpected visitor.

Panic Button is already available for the users of Opera GX. However, they need to first activate the “Early Bird” option in the browser settings.

As the name suggests, Early Bird allows users to access new features and updates before they are officially released. On the other hand, this comes with the price of potentially lower stability and other hiccups that may affect the overall experience. However, you can still wait until the feature is officially rolled out.

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