Opera announced today that the latest version of its flagship web browser is now available, offering key features from its Neon concept browser.

“It’s time to rethink the browser,” Opera’s Krystian Kolondra explains. “Now, the best parts of Neon are being brought to the new Opera browser, codenamed Reborn.”

Opera 45, as the release is really called, offers the following new features:

The best of Neon. Opera’s Neon concept browser was released back in January as an experiment to predict the future of web browsers. Opera 45 incorporates key Neon features, including messaging integration and content discovery functionality.

Integrated chat. Opera 45 offers integrated support for the Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, and Telegram messaging services. These services are available from a new sidebar and can work as overlays or side-by-side with the current tab.

UI improvements. Opera now provides two color themes, light and dark, and it comes with a variety of fun backgrounds. More important, Opera now ships with a “modern, simplified, refined and playful” new user interface with an updated layout, simpler, light and more efficient tabs, that new sidebar, new icons, high DPI support, animations, and more.

Ad blocking improvements. Building on its previous support for ad blocking, Opera 45 now auto-reloads a web page when you toggle ad blocking, and it includes various improvements to block list management.

Security improvements. Opera will now warn when sensitive form fields are not HTTPS.

Performance improvements. On Windows, Opera 45 now decodes videos using your PC’s GPU for improved performance. “This will allow for significantly higher framerates, higher resolutions, and lower battery usage for these videos,” Opera says.

Chromium 58. Because Opera is based on the Chromium 58 rendering engine, it includes a number of improvements related to that release. You can learn more here.

You can download Opera 45 for Windows from the Opera website.

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