Opera 86 dev channel update brings horizontal tab scrolling

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

The feature, called Horizontal Tab Scrolling, places an arrow button at either end of the tab bar, clicking the one to the left or right of the list, respectively. Opera’s tab bar, unlike other browsers, dynamically resizes tabs as you open more and more tabs. This makes it difficult to find a particular tab, so the new feature could come in handy. But at this point, I think the search tab panel is still the best way to manage tabs.

Now when you update to the latest version, you may think that horizontal tab scrolling is not working. Firefox has a similar feature (wheel mouse gesture) that kicks in when you have 25 or more tabs. As I am used to, I assumed that Opera has a similar requirement, so I kept opening more tabs. Opera doesn’t display the arrow buttons to scroll through the tabs until the entire tab bar is filled. I had to open 54 tabs for the icons to show up on my 1080p monitor.

Horizontal tab scrolling is enabled by default. You can’t disable the feature directly from the browser settings, but you can toggle a preference from the opera:flags page. Look for the flag that is labeled “Scrollable Tab Strip”, click the dropdown menu next to it and select the Off option.

Users who are in the stable channel of the browser can enable the setting mentioned above, to test horizontal tab scrolling without installing the build from the development channel.

Hide tabs of 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 appears when you mouse over a tab. To disable the list, head to Settings > Advanced > User Interface > and toggle the switch next to “Show tabs from the same domain in tab tooltips.”

New snapshot tools in the Opera browser

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

The other change allows you to capture a snapshot by selecting text, you will need to highlight a minimum of 3 words, after which the “Snapshot” button appears in the popup panel. It acts as a shortcut to save the snapshot, so you can copy the text or save it as an image.

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

Horizontal tab scrolling is a nice feature, but I think the implementation could have been better. I prefer scrolling through the tabs with the mouse wheel, a feature the app doesn’t yet have. But since the Opera browser has pioneered mouse gestures, I think we can expect it to be added in the future.

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