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Opera Shows Off Its Smart New Redesign That's Just Like All the Other Browsers (arstechnica.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the similar-or-equal dept.

Opera has unveiled a major redesign for its browser that's expected to ship in version 59. As Peter Bright writes via Ars Technica, "the new appearance adopts the same square edges and clean lines that we've seen in other browsers, giving the browser a passing similarity to both Firefox and Edge." From the report: The principles of the new design? "We put Web content at center stage," the Opera team writes on its blog. The design is pared down so that you can browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions." Borders and dividing lines have been removed, flattening out parts of the browser's interface and making them look more uniform and less eye-catching. The new design comes with the requisite dark and light modes, a welcome trend that we're glad to see is being widely adopted.

Being Web-centric is not a bad principle for an application such as a browser, where the bulk of the functionality and interest comes from the pages we're viewing rather than the browser itself. At first blush, I think that Opera has come up with something that looks good, but it does feel like an awfully familiar design rationale. [...] Opera plans to ship the R3 release in March, and a developer preview can be downloaded today to give the new appearance a spin. The new design isn't the only notable feature of R3; it also integrates a crypto wallet for Ethereum transactions. In conjunction with Opera on your phone, this feature can be used to securely make online payments to sites using Coinbase Commerce for their payment processing.

54 comments

  1. Lemmings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The design is pared down so that you can browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions."

    Thank god, I love not being able to see the edges of tabs, etc.

    Why is the UI/UX world so full of fucking lemmings?

    1. Re:Lemmings by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Yeah, that whole minimalist philosophy is getting old. There's a reason why things are where they are. It is so you can use them. They're not in the way, they're were they should be, that handful of pixel space you save isn't worth the irritation of having to jump through hoops for what should be a single click.

      If I wanted minimalism, I'd junk my mouse & keyboard and browse the web with a series of hidden foot pedals.

    2. Re:Lemmings by arglebargle_xiv · · Score: 1

      The headline should really read "flat-tard zombies eat Opera developer's brains". I guess it just took them a bit longer to swim (or walk) to Norway from the spawning grounds in Silicon Valley and Redmond.

    3. Re: Lemmings by Z00L00K · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Windows 2.0 from some 30 years ago...

      --
      If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
    4. Re:Lemmings by swillden · · Score: 1

      The design is pared down so that you can browse "unhindered by unnecessary distractions."

      Thank god, I love not being able to see the edges of tabs, etc.

      On what browser can you not see the edges of tabs?

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
  2. Visa Versa by nanospook · · Score: 2, Informative

    Many of the features that Opera came up with in the 90's were adopted by the other browsers. I'm pretty sure that Opera invented the TAB concept. At least, it was the first time I ever saw a tab was in Opera. I'm sure there are a slew of other features as well. Opera was very on the edge back then. I still use it as much as I can, probably because Speed Dial is so useful and entertaining. it used to be my mail client as well before gmail took over.

    --
    Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
    1. Re:Visa Versa by Misagon · · Score: 5, Informative

      The current Opera browser and company behind it has very little left of the old Opera in it.
      The old core team left to develop Vivaldi.

      --
      "We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
    2. Re:Visa Versa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      NetCaptor had modern tabs before Opera, though some consider Opera's MDI interface at the time to be sufficiently tab-like if you set it up that way (and some consider the MDI interface to be superior, not that it matters much).

      Speed Dial is probably the last of Opera's UI advancements, though I vaguely recall addons or plugins doing the same thing before Opera added it as a default feature.

    3. Re:Visa Versa by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

      I'm pretty sure that Opera invented the TAB concept.

      I remember using Opera in the late 1990s, and it had sub-windows for each page within the main window. When maximized, you'd basically have tabs. The sub-window concept looked messy, especially on a smaller screen.

      However, I think the tab concept was already used elsewhere before browsers. For example, spreadsheet programs commonly allow you to handle separate sheets in one window, and the setup looks exactly like browser tabs. The whole idea of handling different "pages" or "documents" of data in one application instance feels quite general and not limited to any single niche.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    4. Re:Visa Versa by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Opera were actually late to the Tabbed browser seen. The first main browsers to have it were netscape (and IE as an addon), though other lessor known ones had it first. Opera came later.

    5. Re:Visa Versa by HarrySquatter · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure that Opera invented the TAB concept.

      Well, you're pretty much wrong. NetCaptor, for example, had tabs 3 years before Opera. Also, the concept of a tabbed interface predates even that by at least another decade and a half. Gosling Emacs had a tabbed interface in the late 80s and it wasn't even the first application to have tabs.

    6. Re:Visa Versa by Daralantan · · Score: 1

      I'm pretty sure that Opera invented the TAB concept.

      TAB is a diet cola soft drink that was produced by The Coca-Cola Company, in 1963!

      I really do miss having all the mouse gestures and extra functions by pressing keys on the numberpad and whatnot from older Opera. I always have a ton of tabs open and it was easy to just fly around in whatever I needed to do.

  3. Browser monoculture by xack · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Not only are we using the same engines, we are sharing the same user interfaces. The web is worse off for it. We need diversity in browser engines and interfaces, but developers are too addicted to conformity.

    1. Re:Browser monoculture by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not only are we using the same engines, we are sharing the same user interfaces.

      What interface? The modern UI design ethic is "hide the user interface" coupled with "never use words when you can use icons that don't convey what they do unless the user already knows." Saves effort on regional translation, I suppose.

      --
      "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
    2. Re:Browser monoculture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      (Soft Cell - Monoculture)

    3. Re:Browser monoculture by nine-times · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I don't see a huge problem in mostly using the same engine if it's open source and being actively developed well. To some extent, you know... the point is to render HTML consistently. I understand the benefit of avoiding a monoculture, but it's better than web developers having to include a bunch of hacks in their sites to get their sites to render properly on each browser. Yeah, it'd be nice if there were different implementations with different approaches to keep things diverse, but if I were a developer I wouldn't want to spend my time reinventing the wheel when there's a perfectly good open-source wheel available.

      And I think part of the reason browsers are a bit stagnant and boring is, we just need to to render HTML. There's really not much room at the moment for interesting innovation. Just render the HTML securely, protect privacy, and block ads and annoyances. Frankly, they should probably be stripping things out. Static web pages shouldn't need to use as much resources as they do.

    4. Re:Browser monoculture by bug_hunter · · Score: 1

      I agree with all of your points.
      The big issue we hit before was Microsoft dominated the early browser wars and things dragged along so slowly because 90s early 2000s Microsoft saw the web as competition rather than a benefit. A good web was bad for Microsoft.
      And the amount of browser hacks you needed to make HTML look good on all browsers, sheesh that was a nightmare.

      Google on the other hand have a very vested interest in the internet as a whole being responsive and active and people can still split off Chromium if a need arises.
      This is actually one monoculture that I think will actually be better for everyone.

      --
      It's turtles all the way down.
    5. Re:Browser monoculture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Here's an idea: to make the browser console more powerful. Why can I not for example say "block cookies '*.google*'' or "show thirdparty requests"? Why does everything even need a UI element? You can't even toggle preferences any more since chrome took away the about:config from old firefox. The browser interfaces today are absolutely HORRID designs.

    6. Re:Browser monoculture by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      These are the exact same arguments I remember hearing back when IE6 became the monoculture. MS even had a vested interest in keeping it going full steam ahead.

      The only difference is that we somehow think that we'll just be able to grab Chromium and run with it if Google goes rogue, and that we'll have any more of a chance than other folks, because... well, actually I don't really see why we're confident in that assertion.

      In fact I see no evidence that Google will accept others' contributions if it doesn't benefit them directly. They regularly refuse all sorts of patches, and leave problems in Chromium until they become the de-facto standards as site rely on them. There really isn't much room for innovation on the engine in that case. We're all either stuck with Google's steering, or we end up forking and having a second engine soon enough.

      So either we get really lucky and Google is truly benevolent, or we end up losing diversity and alternatives, just to have to create them later by forking something that Google still has the majority of control over. I'm not sure that risk is worthwhile is just so web developers can avoid having to "hack" web pages.

      In fact, I'm not even convinced in the whole "bothersome hacks are still needed" line at all. Edge and Firefox went the extra mile in the past couple of years to achieve a pretty awesome state of interop on the basics. It's only when folks use the wrong tools for the job that they generally run into problems (usually, that amounts to relying on old IE-compatible stuff rather than modern tools like grid, flexbox, SVG icons, etc). And worse, they don't care to even report when there's an interop difference, they just don't care about the ecosystem as much as pushing out their site.

      To me, that's a sign that we really don't care about the health of the web or our users, just our supervisors and immediate shareholders. We'd rather dictate to people how to view our content than live up to the ideals we once claimed to care about. It's just so much easier to fart out an offensively resource-intensive, inaccessible, Chrome-specific "app" then it is to have to learn how to not rely on Chrome-specific stuff that you have to ultimately hack around.

      But this is all just pissing in the wind, really. If we cared, we wouldn't have excused ourselves like we do. It's just a job now, the honeymoon is over. We need another swing of the old pendulum to remind us why having no passion and taking the easy way out isn't sustainable, even if we sugarcoat it with sweet delusions that Google's needs will match our own or that we'll somehow pick up the slack if they don't.

    7. Re:Browser monoculture by doom · · Score: 1

      Well you know, you've got to dumb things down for the swipe-and-wipe crowd. They never do anything much, so there's no point in putting in features to do anything, because we are all just consumers of the big infotainment pipeline.

    8. Re: Browser monoculture by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      "We're all individuals!"

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    9. Re:Browser monoculture by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      We need diversity in browser engines and interfaces

      No we don't. We need diversity only in the engines. The interfaces should all approach a standardised single best practice to easily facilitate users moving between devices and software without having to learn everything new.

    10. Re:Browser monoculture by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      I don't see a huge problem in mostly using the same engine if it's open source and being actively developed well. To some extent, you know... the point is to render HTML consistently. I understand the benefit of avoiding a monoculture, but it's better than web developers having to include a bunch of hacks in their sites to get their sites to render properly on each browser.

      Why do you assume those are the two choices? There is a 3rd choice: Web developers write standard code and the browsers are left to implement the standards. Just because something is open source does not mean it's good. The monoculture even with open source is still a massive problem as the standards stop driving development of software, and rather the development of software starts driving the standards. This is exactly the shit we had with IE6. Had IE6 been open source the internet wouldn't have been any less of the incompatible non-standard shitstorm that it was either.

    11. Re:Browser monoculture by swillden · · Score: 1

      These are the exact same arguments I remember hearing back when IE6 became the monoculture. MS even had a vested interest in keeping it going full steam ahead.

      What idiot who didn't know Microsoft made those arguments about IE6? MS was still very much in Embrace/Extend/Extinguish mode back then. No one who looked at the larger picture could have thought the IE6 monoculture was good for the web in the long run.

      --
      Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
    12. Re:Browser monoculture by nine-times · · Score: 1

      Just because something is open source does not mean it's good.

      I didn't say it was. My point was more that the danger of the risk of monoculture was mitigated by the monoculture being open source. Someone can always innovate off of the open source project. Without open source, you have vendor lock-in and monopolies.

      The monoculture even with open source is still a massive problem as the standards stop driving development of software, and rather the development of software starts driving the standards.

      To some extend, development always drives standards. Someone develops a new thing, then it's standardized, then others can develop to the standard. That's not the danger that monoculture presents.

      This is exactly the shit we had with IE6. Had IE6 been open source the internet wouldn't have been any less of the incompatible non-standard shitstorm that it was either.

      That's not really true at all. If IE6 were open sourced than people could have either chosen to standardize based on that implementation, or at least implemented an IE6-compatible rendering mode. Or someone could have made a fork of IE6 with more standards-compliant rendering. There would have been options.

      Also, MS wouldn't have had the motivation to create IE the way they did if it were open source. They were intentionally perpetuating vendor-lock-in, and that was the real problem.

    13. Re:Browser monoculture by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      My point was more that the danger of the risk of monoculture was mitigated by the monoculture being open source.

      And my point was that this is completely wrong. The availability of source code and the ability to fork something doesn't change that the monoculture in question ends up with significant power and sway to drive standards rather than the reverse.

      We're seeing this already. Chrome's underlying engine is open source and yet the W3C has started to adopt whatever Chrome does because it's already in active use.

      To some extend, development always drives standards. Someone develops a new thing, then it's standardized, then others can develop to the standard. That's not the danger that monoculture presents.

      Disagree. Someone *proposes* a new thing and then it is standardised. What happened in the day (and what is happening now) is that someone proposes something, develops something, the web adopts said something, and the standards body is sitting there hamstrung with no option other than to adopt said something in the next standard. That is the danger that a monoculture presents. To say otherwise ignores the mistakes of IE6 and ignores what is going on right now.

      That's not really true at all. If IE6 were open sourced than people could have either chosen to standardize based on that implementation, or at least implemented an IE6-compatible rendering mode.

      Good. You finally agreed with me (though in a roundabout way) that a monoculture destroys standardisation and even with open source puts an incredible amount of power in the hands of whomever runs the core project.

      Or someone could have made a fork of IE6 with more standards-compliant rendering.

      So what are we saying: "Fork the code, do something that breaks the way the monoculture developed internet works, and hope for adoption?" That isn't a winning strategy. That's not even a "I want to play this game" strategy.

      Also, MS wouldn't have had the motivation to create IE the way they did if it were open source. They were intentionally perpetuating vendor-lock-in, and that was the real problem.

      Ahem... You should really look at Google, Chromium, and the business practices that are going on. Open source does nothing to prevent vendor lockin. When the competition is perpetually in catchup mode you are still locked in regardless of the availability of source code.

  4. Who Cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    No one in their right mind uses this trash browser.

    1. Re:Who Cares by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Slashdot is a trash portal, not quite a browser yet although they do fuck up UTF like a browser, hmm...

  5. But it supports hosts files by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Which makes it good.... for me to poop on!

  6. Yes: Browser monoculture, with hidden intensions? by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 2

    Not only is there a "browser monoculture", browser makers sometimes seem to have hidden intentions. For example, why does Firefox use a lot of CPU power and add more memory use when you aren't looking at any Firefox window?

    A long time ago I installed Google Chrome and it installed 3 system services. I stopped the services, uninstalled Google Chrome, and never used it again.

    Pale Moon told me not to use NoScript. Why? Luckily, Pale Moon is still allowing NoScript.

  7. but still Chinese ownership correct? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    So i putter along with Firefox although I do prefer Operas look and features.

    1. Re:but still Chinese ownership correct? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not exactly. Opera's parent company went public last year.

  8. I like that sort of design by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I think its a great ideal for Opera to separate itself from another Chrome lone look.. Glad they are siding with a more Windows 10ish look along with Edge and Firefox. Honestly the Chrome clone's thing is really in excess these days.

  9. Everything is fake these days... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    How dare they even call Opera a "browser" when it's nothing but Chrome and some stupid bullshit added on top? There is no ambition left in today's "developers". No skills. Nothing but fucking bullshit, all day, every day.

  10. Vivaldi by ASCIIxTended · · Score: 1, Interesting

    After using Vivaldi for a while I'm never going back to other browsers. And yes I know it uses the Chrome engine and plugins.

    --
    I do not belong to the church of the lowercase 'i'
  11. Emphasis on content: good. Flat design: bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Of course it's a good thing for the browser to just get out of the way and show the web content. Much like an OS should just get out of the way and facilitate the apps.

    Oh wait, what fantasy world am I living in?

    In any case, "minimalistic" and "flat design" are not at all the same thing. Good UI design is discoverable and instinctive. Clickable items actually look clickable, not like miscellaneous text strewn around the screen. Functions and settings are easy and obvious to find. Fonts are large enough, colors contrast enough, that you don't have to think twice. Study after study has shown that flat design kills productivity. Whichever hipster (Ives?) decided that cool trumps functional was an idiot, and we're all still suffering.

    1. Re:Emphasis on content: good. Flat design: bad by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Clickable items actually look clickable...

      Define "look clickable".
      We no longer use cuneiform writing and so we no longer need to use those abstract grey boxes from Windows 95.
      The visual cues that tell you "this is clickable" were bizarre and alien to your grand parents when Windows first came out (and even motif and other GUIs before that) and so on it goes.
      It's a tradeoff between "this looks good and doesn't hurt my eyes" versus "the computer practically drives itself" versus "I have absolute and explicit control"
      And it's unreasonable to demand that everything stay frozen looking like Windows XP for all time.

      ...not like miscellaneous text strewn around the screen.

      What do you spend most of your time doing on a computer?
      Looking at pictures and reading text.
      So the UI should be optimized around that-- boxes and bevels etc. are just visual clutter and makes the primary mission of your computer more difficult.

      Functions and settings are easy and obvious to find

      Subjective. Also, they are.

      Fonts are large enough, colors contrast enough, that you don't have to think twice.

      I thought you were just complaining about all this new-fangled everything-is-text-and-unembellished-shapes design?
      Not having to think twice is precisely the point of the new-fangled flatness + icons + text. For example, I cannot glance at text without reading it. So seeing a lot of text on screen can slow me down and takes up a lot of precious screen space besides--- this is why icons exist.
      Were you born knowing how to drive a car and knowing what that odd symbol means on top of a gear shift?

      Study after study has shown that flat design kills productivity. Whichever hipster (Ives?) decided that cool trumps functional was an idiot, and we're all still suffering.

      Nobody is making you use software that you hate.
      Go install Linux and try out the literally dozens of desktops and hundreds of user interface themes until you find a combo that you like (it won't even take very long at all).
      Also, it seems like it's you that's the hipster because you're getting all elitist about nostalgic user interfaces and esoteric rules of "good" UI design that only you seem to know about.

      Get off your own lawn, grandpa, the world doesn't revolve around you.

  12. Browser UI Redesigns... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Redesigns that nobody needed, adding "features" that nobody asked for.

  13. irrelevant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Use Vivaldi instead.

    1. Re:irrelevant by Stephen+Chadfield · · Score: 1

      I have been using Vivaldi for many months now.

      The reasons:

          1. Support for Windows and Linux (Android coming one day).
          2. 1% zoom increments for my weary eyes.
          3. Chrome extensions (Google Translate and Tideways mainly).

      There are some additional features which are nice-to-have like tab tiling and cloning which come in handy for web development.

      I can make it look grey and unobtrusive on Windows without faffing about with theme extensions so it is nice to use for Netflix and other media.

  14. Ugh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Now I have to avoid slashdot to avoid Peter "not so" Bright articles as well?

  15. Re:It shits me to tears by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What, graphical signs are too hard at first sight? You still can have hover tips, you know.

  16. Re:It shits me to tears by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Every modern graphical sign is meaningless. Hover tips are essential. So why not dispense with the meaningless graphics and just use the words?

    Does three lines stacked on top of each other have some meaning beyond "this is what UI people put on pages these days instead of a menu"?

    Does a star/gear/sprocket thing have any meaning beyond "this is what UI people put on pages these days instead of a menu"?

    Can you tell ahead of time what the "+" button of any page will do? Could be anything. Why not use some words and tell us? Pressing "+" and having it do something I don't want is annoying as f... but that's how everyone expects everything to be used these days: experiment until it breaks and tough shit what broke while doing that.

    And the extra bit of spicy sizzle: I'm probably not using your UI on a phone. I don't have to have it squeezed into a tiny box. I have space and I want to use it.

  17. Posted using Opera v12.18 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I still use it every day.. great email client and legacy webpages load way faster with a tiny fraction of system resources. Including duckduckgo, National weather service, gmail!, government pages...

  18. Is Vivaldi Open Source by openright · · Score: 1

    https://help.vivaldi.com/artic...

    It builds on open source, but not it is is not.

    I suppose one could make an open source browser from their released modified source, replacing the proprietary UI code.

    But why bother. Why not just start with upstream chromium?
    If their changes are great, why can't they be upstreamed to chromium?

    Opera, like many companies, does not understand how to work with open source.

  19. Integrated Crypto Wallet by enriquevagu · · Score: 1

    Wow! People are focusing on the minimalist UI, and they didn't notice it will integrate a crypto wallet. At last!

  20. Re:Yes: Browser monoculture, with hidden intension by hairyfeet · · Score: 2

    Sigh...Pale Moon got rid of NoScript because they were having issues with NoScript's ABE support and from what I've read when they went to the NoScript dev and told them the issue? He did the Ghostbusters 2016 bird bit and made it pretty clear he had exactly zero fucks to give about any issues Pale Moon might be having. If you want to keep trying to make it work as it degrades over time? More power to ya but the PM devs simply routed around the problem by giving us uBlock Origin Updater that installs uBlock Origin and keeps it up to date for you, no muss no fuss and from what I've read the uBlock team is more than happy to work on issues that may crop up with PM support.

    BTW if you ever need a Chromium or newer Firefox based browser without all the extra service crap? Try Comodo Dragon and IceDragon, the only service they install is the update service (which you can easily opt out of at install by simply picking portable version) and the few add ons it comes with (like the media downloader and social media share button) can be tossed with just a right click if you don't want 'em but I personally find to be quit handy. Their UI has been pretty static for at least a couple years now so if you are like me and hate the way Chrome and FF are constantly mucking with things its a nice change of pace.

    --
    ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.