In the early part of the year, Opera Software announced that they would be updating their built-in currency converter in order to support digital currencies. Initially, the company is planned to roll out support for Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and Litecoin (LTC).
The feature has been active since the last few releases of the browser, and we decided to give it a try to check out its accuracy among other things. As a reminder, the currency converter essentially lets one convert fiat currency to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin and Bitcoin Cash.
You can enable the feature on your Opera browser by going through the below steps –
– Go to preferences.
– Click on the Browser sub section.
– Scroll to the “User Interface” Field.
– On the “On Text Selection Convert Currency” box select your currency of choice.
– And you’re done. The option is now enabled.
While the currency conversion works well, there are some major issues, with the conversion software being a new product. For starters, the software only converts values to the digital currency of choice only when the currency symbols are used, like $. If a website uses the currency acronym instead of the symbol, like USD instead of $, the currency converter just refuses to work.
Another shortfall of the cryptocurrency converter is the fact that it cannot convert the values given in a different form of cryptocurrency to the desired cryptocurrency. So, you would have to convert it manually by putting the values on a currency conversion website like CoinMarketCap among others.
The other major shortcoming of the converter is the fact that it refuses to consider amounts written in words, like millions or billions, and it only accepts the values when written in numeric form. So while it would accept the value of $220,000,000 and convert it to the preferred digital currency, it would not accept $22 million properly and would only convert the $22 part, ignoring the million part.
But, all things considered, for a new product, the currency converter works well, and is a godsend to those who wish to convert fiat currencies on the go in seconds. A nifty time saving tool in our opinion, with a large scope of being even better for their users.
This addition is among Opera’s various measures to implement features to help those seeking to engage in cryptocurrency work over the internet, with the browser similarly implementing a tool to block websites running scripts to mine cryptocurrencies using their visitors’ CPU power.
