Opera’s Next Update Brings Anti-Bitcoin Mining Feature

There are countless websites live today that hijack a visitor’s CPU to mine for virtual currencies like Bitcoin. They do that without the visitor’s consent or knowledge in order to make money for themselves. It’s unethical and a breach of trust but sadly it’s something that doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, particularly with digital currency values soaring in recent months. Opera has now developed a feature that will prevent these websites from using a visitor’s PC to mine for digital currency.

Opera will soon release version 50 of its web browser. The beta has already been released and it comes with the NoCoin feature. The feature will protect users from cryptocurrency mining by websites.

The company has eliminated cryptocurrency mining scrips that overuse a device’s computing ability. Opera 50 users will be able to prevent websites from doing this by simply enabling the browser’s ad blocker. Once this feature is enabled, pages that have scripts for mining digital currency will be blocked in a similar way that the built-in ad blocker blocks ads.

It has shared an example of the load that the CPU is put under when a cryptocurrency mining script runs on a machine and just how much can be freed up instantly when such scripts are blocked.

The beta version of Opera 50 is now available for download. The stable version should be out in the near future.

Adnan Farooqui
Categories: Computers
Tags: cryptocurrency, opera