Opera the company behind The Opera Browser has been working on something. It is another browser called Opera Neon.
Now you might be thinking that this is yet another drop in the already existing ocean of browsers. But hold your horses, the opera neon may be completely a new type of browser. They have said that it might just be the future of browsing. So is it really the future of browsing? Let’s have a look at it.
Opera Neon is currently available only for Windows and MacOS, so our friends at the Open-Source side are going to have to wait. Just head over to their website. And hit the download button. It was a light only around 37 MB in size which is much better than the other players.
I wanted to capture the installation but I couldn’t. Believe me or not, it installed in a flash. I just clicked my downloaded file and it installed itself in less than 2 seconds or so.
The First Launch
It launched relatively faster than I had expected. This is what the home screen looks like.
If you see the background, that is actually my Desktop’s wallpaper. Opera Neon’s background picks up your wallpaper to give a feel that the browser is floating on your desktop.
Also, the website icons that you see are actually bookmarks.
Let’s go ahead and click some buttons.
As you can see on the left-hand side, the hamburger menu on click opens up some general settings. I have also clicked on the gallery icon which opens up snaps captured by you on different websites which is again a really cool thing to have for some people.
Another feature worth mentioning.
So I played a song on youtube and then moved to another tab, what I found was that I could control the video playback from an icon on the right-hand toolbar.
Opening a few Tabs in Opera Neon
So I decided to open up few tabs and what I found was that the tabs open up in a smaller frame inside the main window of the application. I was somewhat thrilled to see this new route of viewing websites until I saw a major problem.
The bubbles you see on the right side are the tabs currently open. Now they look really cool but when you open 10 of them they don’t decrease in size, instead, they stack up and a horizontal scroll bar appears. This will not be appreciated because it is very common for not just power users but general people also, to have 10-15 tabs open simultaneously.
The Browser’s About section
The last line in the about section says that it is based on chromium. For those who don’t know Chromium is an open source browser and even Google Chrome is based on chromium. So we can expect some rock-solid performance.
Chrome Vs. Chromium
Conclusion
Opera Neon focuses a lot on UI and UX without losing out on performance. Even though I love the music playback control and the snapshot gallery widgets I feel it would be better if they were part of a plugin or extension layer so more of them could be added or removed as per the user’s choice.
The overall browsing experience is fresh, but as a user, I was unable to completely immerse myself in the websites I was visiting because the non-full window layout kept bringing my focus back to the tabs and toolbars.
Have you tried the Opera Neon? What do you think about the design? If there is something you like about it, let us know in the comment section below.
