Opera Reborn 3: No modern browser is perfect, but this may be as close as it gets

[Karlston]

While not as innovative as its mobile brethren, new release closes the gap with Vivaldi.

Enlarge / Both the new dark view and light view look good.

Opera

When Opera Software unveiled a new look and feel for its browser earlier this year, the company made a big deal of the impending changes. "We put Web content at center stage," the Opera team declared on its blog. And early previews of the design appeared to be quite pared down, allowing users to browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions" as the Opera team put it.

 

Well Opera recently released what the company refers to as Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser, and it's tempting to dismiss the name as little more than marketing hype. But given the relentless and utterly unspectacular updates that the Chromium project releases every six weeks, it can also be hard to denote actual big releases of browsers based on Chromium—hence the "Reborn" moniker. After spending some time with Reborn 3, however, the name seems accurate. For Opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what arrived with the move to Chromium 60.

 

Opera Reborn 3—or Opera 60 if you want to stick with version numbers—transitions a slew of features that recently debuted in Opera's mobile browsers to the desktop. The big three in this release are support for blockchain-secured transactions, a crypto wallet to go with the mobile version, and a new overall look with light and dark themes available. So if you haven't checked out Opera lately, it's worth revisiting, especially for those older Opera fans still smarting about the switch from Opera's Presto rendering engine to Google's Blink rendering engine.

 

Opera once filed a complaint with the EU saying that Internet Explorer was holding back the Web "by not following accepted Web standards." The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to other things) probably never imagined their browser would one day share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but it does now. And it's true, this is not the Opera of old—there's no mail client, no IRC support to name a few things—but it does presently offer features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium.

 

That said, Opera's user base (like that of every other Web browser) pales next to Google Chrome. But Opera was the originator of many things we all take for granted that have become part of any Web browser these days. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and the "speed dial" of page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started life in Opera. The company's innovation track record is impressive, and it bears paying attention to what Opera is doing.

 

Firefox, Chrome, and the rest have long since copied all those features listed above, but for quite some time if you wanted to know what the future of the Web browser looked like, you checked in with what Opera was doing. So while Opera may have opted for aspects of the current en vogue playbook by taking a Web-centric approach to Reborn 3, what makes this latest release interesting is that it does offer quite a few new things that still feel well afield of what the rest of the market is doing.

Enlarge / If you've been tinkering with Opera's innovative mobile browsers like Touch—a browser designed for one-handed use—you might recognize a few additions to Reborn 3.

Opera

Reborn 3

The first thing that jumps out about Opera 60 is that most of the new features arrived in the mobile version first and came to the desktop afterward. This makes sense given that much of Opera's user base today is on mobile. In fact, mobile is one area where Opera still leads the browser field with considerable innovation.

 

For instance, Opera Touch has managed to do something no other mobile browser has yet pulled off—making it easy to browse with one hand even on larger devices. Touch also has some thoughtful features like a built-in cookie dialog blocker that's actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal-compliance cookie notices.

 

I've also long been a fan of Opera Mini, which is a perfect mobile browser for bandwidth constrained situations. Opera Mini pipes all traffic through Opera's servers to first compress pages, after which they are sent on to your phone in much smaller form. This saves considerable bandwidth. I wouldn't use it for mobile banking, but it's great for casual Web surfing on sketchy 2G/3G connections.

 

Admittedly, Opera's desktop offering with Reborn 3 is considerably less innovative in comparison to those two. But this newest release still offers plenty of features you won't find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and crypto wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update, though, is the new look.

 

 

Any visual redesign is likely to anger at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception, judging by the Opera forums. That said, to my eye the new look is really nice. It's clean, well-thought-out in terms of feature placement, and does a good job of staying out of the way of the actual webpage.

 

The new look follows the general trend that's enchanted browser makers for years now—reducing the user interface in the name of better displaying the webpage. Opera doesn't carry this trend as far as some competitors, however. The browser, for example, still retains its very useful sidebar.

 

You can hide the sidebar if you don't use it, but personally I don't worry about the browser using horizontal screen real estate. Even my tiny 12-inch, 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do dislike is losing vertical real estate to the UI and here Opera has gone full minimalist, taking up fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite browser in this regard, Vivaldi.

 

In fact, the Opera 60 redesign bears more than a passing resemblance to Vivaldi, a browser once heralded as the spiritual successor to the beloved Opera of old. Reborn 3 has a similar looking sidebar, square tabs, and generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has been still paying attention to recent efforts from its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, who now serves as CEO of Vivaldi.

 

While I like Opera's new look, it's not without some shortcomings. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than will fit on screen, it scrolls them off screen. While I realize many people like this (judging by Opera's user forums), it drives me crazy—just keep making the tabs smaller.

 

On the plus side, Opera's tab menu in the toolbar, complete with large preview images of the currently hovered tab, is amazing for quickly finding that tab needle in a haystack. What would be even better is if it could be activated and navigated with the keyboard.

 

The other two standout improvements in the Opera 60 redesign are two new buttons in the menubar, one for the "easy setup" menu and another for the snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the startup page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you'd regularly want to change—theme, clearing browser data, enabling/disabling the sidebar, and more—are just a click away. This is helpful because Opera's settings page, while not as labyrinthine as Vivaldi's, remains extensive. Finding what you want can take a minute.

 

 

The snapshot tool is a another nice one to have easy access, too, though for those who don't do massive amounts of Web-based research it might be somewhat less useful.

Web 3.0

Once you get past the changes to the user interface, most of what's new in Opera 60 feels, well, ahead of its time. Most users probably aren't going to immediately rush out and start buying everything in cryptocurrencies or switch to storing files on IPFS. Still, Opera's blockchain support is interesting, as is the built in Crypto Wallet (that's another feature that was already part of Opera Mobile).

 

Crypto anything, let alone wallets, is nearer to the bleeding edge of the Internet than most browsers are willing to go. Opera has, wisely I think, left this disabled by default. So to turn it on, head to the aforementioned easy setup menu and turn on the Crypto Wallet.

 

Opera has been heavily touting what it calls Web 3 as part of this release, but just what that means varies considerably by who's using the phrase. What Opera (and others) call Web 3 mostly refers to sites and apps built using blockchain-based distributed tools rather than the traditional client-server model that has powered the Internet since the beginning. But once you get past that initial definition, there's often a lot of white papers, hand waving, and muttering of the phrase blockchain. The hope is that distributed tools will eventually create a more decentralized Web with fewer single points of failure, but that's still a long way off.

 

For now, the most mainstream part of the decentralized Web stack is payment processing. Instead of payments through credit cards or Paypal, there's Bitcoin, Ethereum and others. This is what Opera is supporting with its new Crypto Wallet. Unfortunately for now, Opera is only supporting Ethereum. Opera plans to add support for more blockchain currencies down the road.

 

There's much more to the so-called Web 3 than payments, though. For every bit of the traditional website stack, there is a blockchain-based equivalent. For example: instead of Amazon S3 for file storage, there's IPFS or Filecoin. Similarly instead of Amazon EC2 for computational needs, a decentralized app built on Ethereum might use Truebit.

 

How well these distributed tools work is still an open question, but they are starting to be used in the wild and you can expect to hear much more about them in the near future. Examples of sites that use (some) of this new tech stack include would-be eBay replacement Openbazaar and YouTube alternative Flixxo.

 

What makes all this interesting (and more than just hype in my mind) is Opera's track record. But now that its founders are long gone, its rendering engine is shared with dozens of other browsers, and its parent company is a Chinese consortium, does Opera still have the sense of vision that has historically made it a good bellwether for the future of Web browsers? That's a question we won't know the answer to for several years.

Getting more out of Chromium

When Microsoft recently announced that it would, like Opera before it, abandon its own rendering engine and build a new version of its Edge Web browser around Blink—which also powers Chrome, Chromium, Opera, Vivaldi, and dozens of others—many people worried that the lack of competition would harm the Web. There are after all effectively only two browsers on the Web now: Firefox and everything else.

 

That may be bad for the Web in some ways, but it has an interesting and positive side effect for users, too. With everything under the hood the same, browsers now have to differentiate themselves on their UI and extra features.

 

This is where Opera seems miles ahead of most of its competitors. Opera ships with a built-in ad blocker, the ability to easily send pages between desktop and phone using Opera Flow, a built-in RSS reader (called Personal News), and a free HTTP proxy that Opera calls a VPN.

Enlarge / Opera's built-in feed reader, Personal News.

Scott Gilbertson

That last distinction is an important one. While connecting to an HTTP proxy over HTTPS gets you some of the benefits of a true VPN, it lacks others like packet level redirection over the tunnel, meaning some add-ons and plugins may not use it. In other words, while better than nothing, Opera's "VPN" does not offer the same level of protection you get connecting to an actual VPN and running all your traffic through it.

 

It's also worth noting that a number of older reviews of Opera's VPN service claim Opera will log your traffic, but the company has a very specific note in its privacy policy that "When you use our built-in VPN service, we do not log any information related to your browsing activity and originating network address." As always, trusting a VPN remains a potentially risky proposition involving faith in large organizations.

 

Of Opera's new above-and-beyond-Chrome features, the killer one, to my mind, is Opera Flow. Nearly every browser with mobile and desktop versions offers some way to sync or share tabs between them. Firefox has built in syncing, as does, for that matter, Opera. But Flow is a little different than sync.

 

Flow is more immediate, doesn't require setting up an account, and doesn't run through anyone else's servers. Instead you "pair" your desktop and mobile browsers using a QR code. Once that's done, you can send links, notes, photos, and movies between your desktop and mobile device. The connection is private and secure, and your data is encrypted before sending.

Enlarge / Send pages, notes, photos and more from the desktop to Opera Touch and back again.

Scott Gilbertson

The only current downside to Flow is that you can only send things back and forth from Opera Touch, not Opera Mini.

 

Once you get beyond headlining features, Opera has some very nice little tools that make everyday browsing better. I'm a fan of the power-saving mode known as Battery Saver. By default it's disabled, but you can head to settings and enable the toolbar button so you can easily toggle Battery Saver on and off. Battery Saver causes Opera to make some background optimizations like limiting animations and limiting tab and plugin activity. Opera claims laptop batteries last 35 percent longer with its battery saver on.

 

Opera's chat sidebar is another nice feature for those who like to keep their various instant messaging accounts easily at hand but not taking up another tab in the browser. Opera's chat sidebar works with WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and VK.

 

And as someone living abroad, Opera has one last killer feature I wanted to use all the time—a currency converter menu. Sadly, it doesn't work for my use case, but I appreciate its existence nonetheless.

 

While I'm browsing, for example, eBay from Mexico, I usually want prices in US dollars, not the default pesos. In theory, Opera should be able to do this. If you highlight a number a toolbar will appear and automatically convert the number to your preferred currency. Unfortunately, because prices in pesos use a dollar sign, Opera thinks they're already in dollars and doesn't convert them. This feature did work well with all the other currencies I tested, at least.

Enlarge / Convert currencies on the fly by selecting text.

Scott Gilbertson

Nothing is ever good enough, but...

Before rendering a verdict on Opera, I should say that I am a perpetual browser switcher. No browser I'm currently aware of is good enough to keep me using it consistently.

 

The latest iteration of Vivaldi is very close to my ideal browser, but it seems to have some memory leaks. Firefox does better with memory, but that browser lacks many features I rely on to get work done. Firefox is also planning to change how it handles DNS in ways that could seriously compromise the browser, which makes me uncertain about its future.

 

Qutebrowser has Vim-inspired, keyboard-driven user interface that's damn near perfect, but it doesn't, and likely never will, support Chrome extentions. That decision makes fine-grained JavaScript blocking impractical. If I could combine Qutebrowser's Vim-like UI with Vivaldi's features, I'd be getting close to my ideal browser. But in the meantime, I tend to switch things up frequently to see what sticks.

 

For the last month, I've been exclusively using Opera on the desktop. The experience has been a very good one, if not perfect. Using Opera has even added a new must-have feature to my list of things I want in a Web browser—Opera Flow. There are lots of sync tools out there to move content between desktop and phone, but I have not found another that's as simple and easy to use as Opera's Flow. I also used the battery saver feature consistently and while I didn't notice anything dramatic in terms of actual battery use, my laptop's fan came on noticeably less often.

 

In the end, though I always end up back at Vivaldi. In recent years, two things always drawn me back: the ability to stack and tile multiple pages in a single "tab" view and the ability to manually manage tab memory via the "hibernate background tabs" option. If you've got limited RAM and open tons of tabs, that latter feature can quickly and easily reclaim a considerable amount of memory. While Opera's battery saver mode is capable of something similar, it lacks the level of control Vivaldi offers. Vivaldi lets me pick and choose which tabs to keep active and which to background.

 

Today in my perpetual browser switching world, Opera pulls a close second to Vivaldi after this testing period. But now, actually, I'm starting to use both with some regularity on the desktop. On my phone, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile remain my browsers of choice until, perhaps, a mobile version of Vivaldi becomes available. And when that happens, we may truly have a world where there are simply two names in Web browsing for serious power users, regardless of your preferred platform.

 

Source: Opera Reborn 3: No modern browser is perfect, but this may be as close as it gets (Ars Technica)

 

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[mp68terr]

Liked the old opera browser, it was my main browser at that time. Now mostly running vivaldi, looks like it is time to try again opera browser through its reborn version.