Opera's stricter privacy controls could also speed up your web browsing
Oh, and they'll limit site tracking, too.
Opera doesn't want to miss the browser privacy bandwagon, and it's taking an unusual angle to sell it: it's promising a speed boost. The newly released Opera 64 includes a tracker blocker that prevents sites from tracking you across the web (usually for ads or behavior fingerprinting) and, reportedly, delivering roughly 20 percent faster page load times. That's likely to vary sharply, but it's something to consider if you're hoping to tackle privacy and performance at the same time. You can turn the feature off on entirely or on a per-site basis if there are any hiccups.
The blocker depends on the EasyPrivacy Tracking Protection List, which covers a host of known tracker scripts. It's not automatically determining which trackers are the offensive ones.
There are some functional upgrades beyond this, we'd add. An upgraded Snapshot lets you save sites as PDFs, capture screenshots of the entire page and crop specific sections. You can add emojis, selfies and text, too. Although these aren't likely to win you over to Opera by themselves (Edge has had annotation for a while), they could be helpful if you like Opera's approach and regularly find yourself commenting on shared web links.
