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

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.

Comments

Lemmings

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Lemmings

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re: Lemmings

[Z00L00K]

Windows 2.0 from some 30 years ago...

Visa Versa

[nanospook]

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.

Re:Visa Versa

[Misagon]

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.

Re:Visa Versa

[TeknoHog]

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.

Browser monoculture

[xack]

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.

Re:Browser monoculture

[PsychoSlashDot]

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.

Re:Browser monoculture

[nine-times]

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.

Re:Browser monoculture

[thegarbz]

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.

Yes: Browser monoculture, with hidden intensions?

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

Emphasis on content: good. Flat design: bad

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It shits me to tears

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Yes: Browser monoculture, with hidden intension

[hairyfeet]

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.