Opera Software, through Aneta Reluga, announced today, January 13, 2016, the availability of the first development build of the upcoming Opera 36.0 web browser in 2016.

Opera 36.0 Build 2106.0 has been pushed earlier to the Opera Developer channel, and it looks like it brings many goodies, among which we can mention multiple modifications to the layout of the Start Page, such as left-positioned navigation panel, merge of Speed Dial and News, thus making it more configurable and simpler to use.

Furthermore, the Opera developers managed to enable the extension expander functionality for users who have way too many extensions displayed on the browser's main toolbar and they want to access them all without the hassle of having to modify the opera:extensions setting.

"Welcome in the New Year! Today, we have the first developer release for 2016. This release is packed with features, some of them expected already by the ones who like to play with the flags, but we still hope there are going to be some nice surprises here," said Aneta Reluga, Desktop QA Team at Opera Software.

The Opera UI received improvements for touch screens

Today's Opera 36.0 Build 2106.0 also ships with UI improvements, making the web browser more usable on touch screens, as well as on computers running Microsoft's latest Windows 10 operating systems. Among these improvements, we can mention the ability to choose between the Opera or the system colors, an extra icon to enable the full-screen mode, as well as bigger context menus.

Last but not least, the Opera developers managed to once again improve the bookmark deduplication functionality, which they promise that it now works more smoothly. Of course, numerous bugs reported by users since the previous build were resolved as well. You can download Opera 36.0 Build 2106.0 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia, but please keep in mind that it's a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.