The browser market has seen some major upheavals recently. However, the look and feel of modern browsers have been more or less the same since Chrome came along. Opera intends to change that.
With a concept browser, Neon, Opera has decided to challenge the status quo. Neon brings a long-awaited refresh to the drab UI of current generation browsers. It its announcement, Opera considered some parts of web browsers to be “nothing more than tributes to the last millennium”. With their latest experimental browser, Opera is giving us a peek into what a future browser might look like.
Neon provides a fluid experience with neat animations that make it look a lot more robust without affecting speed. It has an intuitive design which uses your desktop background as its start page giving it a near-transparent look. The start page consists of rounded floating icons and a sidebar.
In Opera’s own words, these are the ‘new’ features that lack in current browsers:
- A new start page that uses your desktop wallpaper as its background.
- A sidebar with its own video player, image gallery and download manager.
- A vertical, visual tab bar on the right side of the browser window that makes it easier to distinguish between tabs.
- An intelligent system that automatically manages your tabs. Like gravity, frequently used tabs will float to the top, while less important tabs will sink to the bottom.
- A completely new omnibox that supports top search engines and open search.
Other features include video pop-out, snap-to-gallery, and split screen mode. As the name suggests, video pop-out lets you play videos outside the scope of the website, snap-to-gallery allows you to snap and crop your screen without any hassles, and split screen mode makes it easier to browse and chat at the same time.
However, Opera Neon is still an experimental browser so you might run into a few issues. While it may not immediately replace your default browser, it does bring a slightly new take to the browsing experience. If you want to give Opera's concept browser a try, you can download it for PC and macOS here.
Source: Opera via Windows Central
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