Opera Neon Turns Your Web Browser Into a Mini Desktop (engadget.com)

Opera today announced it's launching a new browser called Opera Neon. From a report on Engadget:It's a separate "concept" browser that shows where software could go. It's much more visual, with an uncluttered look, tabs and shortcuts as bubbles and a side control bar that largely gets out of your way. However, the real fun starts when you want to juggle multiple sites -- this is more of an intelligent desktop than your usual web client. If you want to have two pages running side by side, it's relatively easy: you drag one of your open tabs to the top of the window, creating a split view much like what you see in Windows or the multi-window modes on mobile devices. Also, Neon acknowledges that your browser can frequently double as a media player. You can listen to tunes in the background, or pop out a video in order to switch websites while you watch. These aren't completely novel concepts all by themselves, but it's rare to see all of them in a browser at the same time.

Comments

But why?

[hackel]

What advantage is there to having a browser manage its own windows instead of the desktop window manager? It's not like this is new—almost every Windows program used to have a multiple-document interface that let you arrange multiple document windows inside of a primary application window. We moved away from this UI for a reason. It makes no sense. It's duplicating the functionality of the primary GUI and window manager. You can easily achieve the same result using existing tiling window managers and other tools. Is there some actual advantage here that I'm missing?