It’s increasingly becoming common for websites to rely on coin mining scripts to hijack a visitor’s CPU resources to mine for virtual currencies. Even Chrome extensions have started doing this. Opera recently revealed that the next update for its popular web browser is going t have built-in cryptocurrency mining protection. The company today released version 50 of the Opera browser with this functionality.
Opera 50’s NoCoin feature will prevent websites from hijacking a user’s CPU to mine for virtual currency without their knowledge. Users can take advantage of this feature by enabling the ad blocker that’s built into the browser.
Once that’s done, pages that have scripts for mining digital currency will be blocked in a manner similar to how ads are blocked by the built-in ad blocker.
Opera released this feature for testing in the beta version of Opera 50 just last week. Test results show that a significant amount of CPU resources are freed up instantly when cryptocurrency mining scripts are blocked.
It’s not like Opera is opposed to cryptocurrencies. It has actually built a currency converter for major digital currencies like Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Bitcoin Cash in its browser. It doesn’t like websites using computers to mine digital currencies without their knowledge, though.
The stable version of Opera 50 is out now and available for download right away.
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