Ah, the perils of switching RSS feed clients. In the process of moving from The Old Reader to Feedly, I apparently missed one feed: Opera Desktop. Mea culpa.

Because of my blunder, I also missed the release of version 20 of Opera’s Webkit-based browser, as well as two subsequent updates. Version 20 was released on March 4, 20.0.1387.77 was released on March 13, and 20.0.1387.82 was released on March 20.

Version 20 adds more customization of the Speed Dial page, drag and drop between Speed Dial and the bookmark toolbar, and several other cosmetic changes. There’s still no bookmark sidebar.

The 20.0.1387.77 and 20.0.1387.82 updates fix some issues related to stability.

A new version of the WebKit-based Opera web browser was announced today. Apparently the only change is some improvement to stability.

Opera 19.0.1326.59 was released yesterday. Apparently the browser engine forming the basis of the browser (WebKit, also the basis of Google Chrome) since version 15 was updated.

Anyone running Opera 18 with auto-updates enabled may have found their Speed Dial entries replaced with default entries when Opera updated itself to version 19 in the past day or so. The problem was detected and resolved quickly, but for some users, the damage had already been done.

The Webkit-based version of Opera is finally starting to look like it may once again distinguish itself from Google Chrome. Version 19 now has a bookmark toolbar; still no bookmark sidebar, but hopefully that’s on the way. The bookmark programming interface has been opened up, so even if Opera developers don’t add a sidebar, someone will.

In fact, two new versions of the Webkit-based Opera browser were released recently. I missed both of them because Opera moved their announcement blog to blogs.opera.com/desktop.

Version 18.0.1284.63 was released on December 6. It includes fixes for GMail compatibility issues.

Version 18.0.1284.68 was released on December 16. It fixes several crashing issues.

Version 18.0.1284.49 of the Webkit-based (and sadly deficient) Opera web browser improves stability and adds a few new features, including camera/microphone support, the ability to move tabs between windows, custom themes, and custom search engines.

The official announcement and release notes pages have additional details.

The Opera development team is working on the next major revisions of the Webkit-based version of the browser, which we will eventually see in the form of Opera 18 and Opera 19. The current stable version is 17, meaning that Opera 17 is not undergoing active development. However, the developers are fixing bugs in Opera 17, and that’s the reason for this update. Version 17.0.1241.53 includes fixes for several crashing problems in the previous release.

Development continues on the new Webkit-based version of the Opera web browser. Version 17 was announced today. This version adds pinned tabs, startup options and custom search engine support.

Purists can still download the classic version 12.x Opera. It remains to be seen how many of the features lost in the transition from the Presto-based browser will be added to the Webkit-based browser. So far there’s plenty missing, including bookmarks, the sidebar and proper tab control.