Looking Sharp - Opera's new skin


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The latest beta build of Opera 9.5 comes with a new default skin - 'Sharp'.

Opera developer 'Borg' described it like this in an entry on the Opera desktop team blog:

If one word should describe the new look, it would be Sharp. We wanted to create a skin with clean lines and clear icons, inspired by the intuitive symbols you can expect at an airport and in line with our Scandinavian heritage. This also better matches the look and feel we introduced on the Wii and refine in Opera 9.5 for Windows Mobile.

The color scheme of the user interface is designed to not steal focus away from your browsing, but being available when you need it and clearly indicate activity (stop button turning red) or security elements.

Screenshot of the Windows version:

post-1302-1212744107_thumb.png

Read more at the source.

Downloads are linked on the above page.

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Wow! "Looking Sharp" is lookin' great! :)

I might even switch to Opera once 9.5 final will be released! :o Just hoping that the Israeli/Hebrew websites (yeah... the ones that know nothing about web standards) will show up fine in it...

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It seems that the skin was inspired by Vista's UI. And it looks good. I'll give it a try as soon as I'm on a computer.

PS: I wrote this post from my iPod Touch.

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It seems that the skin was inspired by Vista's UI. And it looks good. I'll give it a try as soon as I'm on a computer.

PS: I wrote this post from my iPod Touch.

You're right, it does look very Vista'ish, looks great.

How good is Opera these days with web page compatibility / formatting / loading etc?

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Under OS X it looks like this:

post-1302-1212745004_thumb.png

Firefox has already shown you can't take a Windows theme, turn it grey, and put it on a Mac version, so why have they done just that? >_> "Sharp"? Yeah, Sharp like a microwave:

img_1364_sharp_microwave.jpg

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the bars to me look to be about 50% larger vertically than they need to be. the tabs are massive. It's an improvement definetly but I think it'd look better if they squished those bars down a bit. nice none the less

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How good is Opera these days with web page compatibility / formatting / loading etc?

I'm using Opera latest snapshots 99% of the time, and even those AJAX heavy sites like Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc. gave no problem at all for me. The only times I need to use something other than Opera are those ActiveX online bank logins, and then I have to use IE :shiftyninja:

Simple yet elegant :happy: So when is Opera 9.5 due for release?

well the old classic Opera skin is just as elegant, and even simpler... :p

the bars to me look to be about 50% larger vertically than they need to be. the tabs are massive. It's an improvement definetly but I think it'd look better if they squished those bars down a bit. nice none the less

That's my main gripe about the new skin too, and why I still use the old "classic" skin.

well, actually, I really love the minimalistic look of the "classic" skin, so maybe I'll keep using it even if they make the new skin's tab bar thinner... :p

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It's not great by a long shot, but it is a massive improvement on the existing theme, which, as the above poster rightly states, has looked out of date and clunky for some time.

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It's not great by a long shot, but it is a massive improvement on the existing theme, which, as the above poster rightly states, has looked out of date and clunky for some time.

out-of-date, maybe, especially if you think everything should look as flashy as Vista UI or KDE4 (which I love, too). But clunky? the Opera (now) Classic UI is one of the most simple, non-intrusive, and functional UI for a browser (IMHO), that's actually one of the major reasons why I love Opera so much, and switched from IE/Firefox/Konqueror to Opera, because of the minimalist UI.

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