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Opera Firefox The Internet Technology

Opera Shows Off Its Smart New Redesign That's Just Like All the Other Browsers (arstechnica.com) 54

Posted by BeauHD 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.
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Opera Shows Off Its Smart New Redesign That's Just Like All the Other Browsers More

Opera Shows Off Its Smart New Redesign That's Just Like All the Other Browsers

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  • Lemmings (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14, 2019 @06:27PM (#58123758)

    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: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by 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.
    • 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.

    • 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?

  • Visa Versa (Score:3, Informative)

    by nanospook ( 521118 ) on Thursday February 14, 2019 @06:28PM (#58123762)
    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 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Thursday February 14, 2019 @07:18PM (#58123974)

      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 [vivaldi.com].

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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 ap

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

    • 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.

  • Browser monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday February 14, 2019 @06:30PM (#58123770)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by PsychoSlashDot ( 207849 ) on Thursday February 14, 2019 @06:54PM (#58123876)

      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: (Score:2)

        by doom ( 14564 )
        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.
    • 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.

    • Re:Browser monoculture (Score:5, Insightful)

      by nine-times ( 778537 ) <nine.times@gmail.com> on Thursday February 14, 2019 @08:50PM (#58124258) Homepage

      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.

      • 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 Chr

      • 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

        • 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

          • 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

    • 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.

  • Everything is fake these days... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

  • Vivaldi (Score:1, Interesting)

    by ASCIIxTended ( 4777373 )

    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.

  • Emphasis on content: good. Flat design: bad (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 14, 2019 @07:37PM (#58124036)

    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.

  • https://help.vivaldi.com/artic... [vivaldi.com]

    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.

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

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