Also: How to use the Opera VPN (and why you should) I know exactly what you’re thinking… bloat. This happened to Firefox some time ago. The developers all of a sudden decided their browser would be a kitchen sink affair by throwing everything at it to see what would stick. That led to the browser being horribly bloated and nearly useless. Fortunately, Mozilla pulled away from that idea and trimmed Firefox back down to its current state. Opera, on the other hand, continues adding features. Now, to the Opera developer’s credit, even with more features than most browsers have to offer, their product does not feel at all bloated. It opens quickly, renders websites as fast as any browser, and doesn’t consume too much in the way of system resources. That’s a very good thing because the developers have added yet more features to the browser, two of which I want to address here. The two features in question are the music player and Shopping Corner.
What are these new features?
Both the music player and the Shopping Corner are pretty self-explanatory. The music player adds a music player to the sidebar, which can be connected to Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and other music accounts. Once connected, you can click to reveal the addition and start playing music without having to open another tab or install yet another application. Since this addition arrived in Opera (with version 91.0.4516.20), I’ve found myself interacting with my Spotify account through Opera instead of the installed desktop client. The only thing I miss from the desktop client is the Discover feature (which I can only find on my Linux desktop client anyway). Also: Cool things you can do with the Linux desktop that you can’t do with MacOS or Windows As far as the Shopping Corner is concerned, this one is a bit confusing because there’s no obvious way to access it. There’s no Shopping Corner icon in the sidebar, no bookmark for it, and no entry in the Opera menu. What gives? Also: The 5 best browsers for privacy: Secure web browsing
