As Opera releases the 16th version of its browser, the company is turning 18 years old, and it has fixed hundreds of bugs to improve the performance and add support, new features, and APIs. As it was announced by the company, the new version will also provide support for HTML5. That was the extent of the statement regarding HTML5, but providing this support shows the company is looking ahead to give developers more options as this format is increasingly being used by more developers for mobile applications. The new stable version will be running on Chromium 29 for desktop.

According to Opera, some of the top changes made from the previous version include:

• W3C geolocation API – lets users share their location with trusted websites when visiting sites with location aware, such as Foursquare (News – Alert);
• Form auto-filler – allows auto-fill forms on the Web;
• Support for jump-lists on Windows – this allows for faster navigation from the task bar;
• Support for presentation mode on Mac – this allows Web browsing with a full screen;
• Better performance.

The company started its fast release cycle with three different streams: stable, next, and developer, because of the fast evolving development channel. The developer is the most unstable version, followed by next which indicates the company is working on stabilizing it for the next final version; and stable, the most stable build available at the time for everyone.

The streams are designed to have increasing levels of stability. This switch was made when the company adopted Chromium, replacing its own Presto platform. The extension model used by Chromium introduced more than 300 extensions with services like AdBlock, Evernote, Feedly, LastFM, PDF Viewer, Pinterest, Pocket, and Yandex (News – Alert).

The release of each new version is getting shorter and shorter, and according to developers at Opera, the full change log has not yet been published for version 16.