Security @ Opera

Today, our Desktop Team are proud to announce the release of Opera 15. This release marks a major departure from previous ones, as it is the first desktop release based on the Chromium engine. This means a great many things for you as an Opera user, most notably improved compatibility with websites that choose to cater only to browser engines such as Chromium. You can read more about these changes and improvements on the Desktop Team blog, product pages or the release notes. However, it also means that there will be some changes to our security practices, and those are what we intend to cover here.

With this release, we will be starting afresh with our monitoring and fixing of security issues. Changelogs and advisories for Opera 15 and later will not consider security issues that were discovered in the Presto line of the Opera desktop product. Only issues that are newly discovered in the Chromium-based product will be mentioned. Opera 12.16 is the next planned security update for Presto based Opera for Desktop. Security updates may follow when needed, but the primary focus will now be on the Opera 15 line. Users are urged to update to Opera 15, and its Opera Mail counterpart, at the earliest opportunity.

From a security perspective, this means that Opera for Desktop will gain the well rounded security of the Chromium project, with features such as the sandboxing of separate processes. It also means that the task of fixing security issues could now lie with either the Chromium project or Opera Software. A great deal of the new product is produced by Opera Software, with only the browser engine being produced by the Chromium project.

If you discover a security issue that affects the Chromium based version of Opera, we would like to know about it, even if you suspect that the fault could lie in part of the product that is produced by the Chromium project. Many parts of Opera 15 are not a part of Chromium at all, and those will need to be fixed by us. In addition, even if the issue is discovered to be outside of Opera code and inside of shared Chromium code, we will still be able to fix it, both for ourselves and other projects based on Chromium. If you have discovered an exploitable security issue in Opera 15, please report it securely using our bug tracking system (please do not report such issues using blog comments), selecting Opera 15 as the version that is affected, and "security issue" as the kind of problem.

The initial release of Opera 15 will be available for Windows and Mac. We do hope to have a release available for Linux in the near future. Until then, Linux users will be able to continue using the Opera 12 line of products, which will continue to function.

EDIT: clarified the situation with Opera 12.x updates.