Opera 136 is Out--Chromium 152, Extension Side Panels, a macOS 26 Traffic-Light Fix, and a Floor That Moves With Google's

Opera 136 is out for the Mac. Opera promoted it to its Stable channel on September 17, and Opera's release post says it is built on Chromium 152.0.7977.120, adds support for the chrome.sidePanel API so extensions can draw their own side panels, and fixes "Save as PDF", a bookmarks bar that vanished after full screen, and traffic lights that ignored the pointer on macOS 26. It arrives three days after macOS 27 shipped on September 14, and it lands as Google moves Chrome, whose Chromium it shares, to a release every two weeks; that schedule and the macOS floor it brings matter more to a Mac user than the side panels.

Extensions get side panels, and the Mac gets two named crash fixes

Opera's changelog for 136 lists the Stable build as 136.0.6008.22, dated September 17, with 41 entries by our count. Two are Mac crashes by name: one in libobjc.A.dylib at BrowserWindowCocoa::GetWidget, and one in the split-screen drop-target popup when its animation ends. The rest is the side panel and its top bar, a preference for where new tabs open in the vertical tab strip, a "limited session restore", a redesigned VPN settings popup, a crash after approving permissions for the ChatGPT extension, and the traffic-light fix, filed as "Traffic lights don't react on hover on macOS 26".

Most of the visible list reached Opera 135 users a week earlier. Opera's September 10 update, 135.0.5973.123, already carried the sidePanel API, the traffic-light and bookmarks-bar fixes, the new-tab preference and, first on its list, a backported fix for CVE-2026-87491. If you took that update, what 136 adds is the Chromium 152 base, the "Save as PDF" fix and the crash fixes.

The Chromium underneath is 152, and Chrome passed it on September 8

That base is behind Google's own browser. Google's Chrome 153 announcement promoted 153.0.8010.36/.37 for Mac on September 8 and lists CVE-2026-87491, an out-of-bounds write in V8 reported by Jihyeon Jeong of Seoul National University's Compsec Lab on August 6 and paid $2,500, with the line "Google is aware that an exploit for CVE-2026-87491 exists in the wild." That is the fix Opera backported on September 10. Even Google's Extended Stable channel, the slow track for enterprise administrators and "Chromium embedders", is ahead: its September 17 update took it to 152.0.7977.134, past the .120 under Opera 136. Opera's post and changelog do not say which of Google's September fixes 136 carries, and we will not guess.

The gap widens on a schedule. Google's March announcement moved Chrome from a release every four weeks to one every two, "starting from the stable release of Chrome 153 on September 8th", and its table put Chrome 154's stable release on Tuesday, September 22; Extended Stable keeps its eight-week cycle. Opera 136 is on 152.

Opera's requirements page says macOS 12, and Chromium 151 dropped it

Opera's requirements page said "macOS 12 or later" on September 20; Opera's July 30 developer post for the first 136 build, then on Chromium 151, says otherwise in a note: "Since Chrome 151 dropped support for macOS 12, we updated the version constraint to block AU on unsupported systems," AU, we take it, being auto-update. Google had said in January that Chrome 150 would be the last release for macOS 12, as 9to5Mac reported, and AppleInsider listed the Macs that Ventura will not install on: iMacs older than the 2017 model, MacBook Airs made before 2018, MacBook Pros older than the 2017 update, Mac minis older than the 2018 refresh, the 2016 MacBook and the cylinder Mac Pro. On those Macs, expect Opera's updater to stop rather than offer 136; neither page says which Opera is the last for Monterey.

Our archive has followed Opera on the Mac since 2001

We timed Opera 5.0TP1 on a 400 MHz PowerBook in July 2001 and found it the fastest of the OS X browsers except at scrolling; our September 2002 item on Opera 6.0 for Mac Beta 1 quoted Opera's promise to "look and feel like a proper Mac OS X application"; the Opera 6 final of December 2002 ran from Mac OS 8.6 to 10.2.2 on Opera's own rendering engine; and Opera 9.0 Universal in June 2006 imported our Safari bookmarks with one click on a Core Duo Mac mini. The engine is Google's now, the floor is Google's too, and the version number has gone from 6 to 136.

Opera's post links the macOS installer. If you took the September 10 update, 136 is a Chromium bump you will not notice; if your Mac is on Monterey, it is a reminder that a Chromium browser's floor moves when Google's does, whatever the vendor's requirements page says.