Opera Neon; First Impressions
Having seen a reddit thread introducing Neon, Opera’s latest web browser. I had to have a play with it. So before bed I quickly installed it and I’ll be live-writing my thoughts here.
1. Installing
As the browser installed, the Opera icon was still the red circle everybody had come to know. When the installation finished however, the tray icon for the browser was a neon green tron-esque version version of the well known ‘O’ logo. Inconsistency aside, I admire them sticking to their logo instead of re-branding entirely a-la Internet Explorer.
2. The front page
I’m greeted with the usual list of shortcuts that you’d expect in your Chrome/Firefox experience. Only there are circles instead of squares and the lay out of these circles seems to be random. These circles come from the bottom of the screen and after they reach the top of their motion path, they come back down. Similar to the physics that are written in the Material Design Guidelines by Google. No complaints as to the motion, but the layout somewhat perplexes me. Nevertheless it is quite aesthetically pleasing.
The default shortcuts that you are greeted with include Dribbble and Medium. Shouting to their design based marketing that probably made me want to download it in the first place. Well played Opera.
The URL bar at the top defaults to google or a url, and they went with a nice green auto-complete which to me is VERY nice looking. kudos.
3. In Page Experience
A quick google search got me to an in-page experience which gives me mixed reactions.
Firstly, the web page doesn't stretch the entire width of the window. While this doesn’t annoy me entirely, it will be interesting to see how many ill-coded websites have their view point breakpoint at something other than 1703px (i’m going to guess its the majority of them.) My main concern is that whether or not a website is usable at this resolution on a desktop or whether it is not doesn’t matter. The site won’t be designed for these resolutions, so you’ll always end up with a sub-par web experience. For a web browser that’s front page says that it wants to ‘put the life back into the internet’, that seems like a foolish thing to do.
The tab for each page on the right hand side is HUGE. It takes up way too much room to be a reminder of what i’m currently not really interested in. I’m in my current tab for a reason. If you wanted to grow the tab section to this big when I hover over a smaller area, then that would be fine because I would have declared my intent. But for me, its WAY too big.
The media section on the left hand side is a nice (albeit gimmicky) addition. From top to bottom the buttons are as follows:
1. new tab: minimises what im currently doing and takes me back to the splash screen with a nice animation. Simple stuff, and something that I imagine we will see more and more in the upcoming windows experience updates.
2. media player: A really, really great idea. If I have any number of tabs open, then I can control the media on any of the tabs with this. Works with video and audio. Really, really great and the functionality works too. 10/10.
3. website snapshot: When you’re in a tab, you can use this to take snipping tool-esque snapshots of your screen, they then appear in your gallery
4. gallery: As mentioned above
5. downloads: Self explanatory
3. Dev Tools
It is using chrome’s dev tool experience. Which is nice. The Neon page doesn’t mention support for existing Chrome apps and extensions. But I would imagine it is something that Opera would like to do, so its a plus from me. Many people use the chrome tools for their web design work, so i’m a fan of ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’
4. Side By Side View
Another gimmick I feel. As people who do the snapping and side-by side views in windows do it with windows itself. We don’t need something that we can already do- screenshot below.
5. Memory
At the time of writing this, I have 2 tabs open in chrome for a total of 128.4mb of memory and 2 tabs open in opera side by side for 94.5mb (93.1mb without), so it’s an improvement by about 26% memory wise. Nice.
Overall
All in all, the Opera browser looks pretty. Functionality wise it delivers some gimmicks, but some very well thought out pieces of work too. For a 1.0 it is a great start and something I hope will gain enough traction so Opera can become a contender in the race for browser supremacy again
