Major changes in Opera's extensions infrastructure

By Andreas Bovens

With Opera switching from Presto to Chromium and a complete UI remake, our extensions infrastructure has also gotten a major overhaul: from Opera 15 onward, Opera 11 & 12’s extension format is no longer supported, and instead, we’ve switched to Chromium’s extension model. At this point, Opera 15 (available as Opera Next) supports a subset of the Chromium extension APIs — with more to come —, as well as our own Speed Dial API.

If you want to upgrade your existing Opera extension to the new format, you can use the conversion tool we’ve built into the Opera extensions catalog’s developer interface and test if the extension works as expected (detailed steps). Of course, you can also reuse an existing Chromium extension or create a new one from scratch. There's a whole new tutorial section with API documentation, examples and more for you to get started.

We’re looking forward to getting the Opera extensions catalog filled with exciting new extensions in the next few months, and will be expanding our support for Chromium extension APIs, as well as adding new Opera-specific APIs.

As for themes, Opera 15 ships with a couple of preset themes, but third party themes are not supported at the moment; however, we plan to bring theming functionality back in the near future, so stay tuned.

If you have questions or feedback, get in touch!

Andreas Bovens

Andreas is based in Oslo, where he works for Opera Software as Extensions Product Manager + Developer Relations.

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license.