Opera Neon concept browser
opera.com
opera.com
Remember when Chrome tried to innovate with how we use bookmarks? [1]
People cry out for innovation, but then freak out when said innovation happens. This is why disrupters are so successful - they can do something crazy and people will try it out and think - this is amazing. Because the mindset/psychology is that this is something new. But the market leader implements exactly the same thing and people won't give it a chance because it's a change and they can't handle change.
But I actually disagree that they are stagnant. They may be hesitant to change the UI, but there is a lot happening under the hood to make them more secure, faster, standards compliant, stable etc.
[1] http://www.omgchrome.com/new-bookmark-manager-chrome-disable...
Edit - Adding an example of recent Firefox innovation being rejected https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/hello-status
Honestly I don't want new features on Chrome or Firefox. They are fine how they are -- though I wish Mozilla would take out the value-added services they just had to add. Release security updates and that's it
They could have improved on it without forcing people to use another Google service too.
Early adopters would flock to it, the comfortable majority would happily stick with what they know. Win win.
Also they kind of just did what you suggested with Duo,Allo and Hangouts.
To play the devil's advocate, couldn't you argue that the reason the take-rate seems high is because only the people that want change are going to use the disrupter's thing, whereas those people represent a very small minority of people using the existing, uninnovative product?
For example, consider what Mozilla did when they first came out with Firefox. They didn't replace the main Mozilla browser; they built a new browser and offered it as an alternative. It took a long time for everyone to switch over, and that's completely OK.
Opera has a well established history of innovating web browsing. So many features we consider normal and must-have in modern browsers were pioneered by Opera. The innovation kind of stopped and a lot of features disappeared when they fired the Presto team and switched to webkit, unfortunately.
Google on the other hand, has a well established history of developing a pretty great idea and then at some point begin making it shittier with each update.
This may be a bias of an old Opera fanboy / IMHO; If you consider innovative features, between Opera (frozen just before they ditched Presto), versus where Chrome has innovated and been developed to today--Developer tooling maybe, but from a user point of view? Nowhere even close. Especially if you consider what was taken away (but then, the entire Presto engine and many of its unique features were taken away too).
Opera has had more of a "Yes, and" approach to innovation, but still they (barely) managed to avoid the "kitchen sink" problem. Old features almost never went away. I used to think the built-in torrent client was unnecessary bloat, but in hindsight was that really a bad idea? Main problem was torrent protocol itself was a bit heavy for computers at the time, making it feel bloaty. Unlike the built in IRC client, which was just another lightweight browser tab unlike Chrome (or Firefox) could ever manage. Still, Opera was also famous for it's tiny executable size.
I think this is a poor example, this does nothing to make the browser better at browsing the web. It's just a feature no one asked for, that has loads of alternatives already. Why do I need video calling built in?
I wouldn't call Firefox stagnant. It's just got E10S (multiprocess). The Quantum project promises to gradually improve both speed and stability (and consequentially security). They are working on replacing the traditional Firefox extensions archetecture with WebExtensions. Fennec (Firefox on Android) is an underappreciated gem.
I'm playing with Vivaldi now. It's nice, it's fast, there's a fair amount of UI innovation. But underneath, it's just Blink, so it's hard for me to get that excited about it.
Fennec is pretty great, yes. I've been using Firefox on ideological grounds for years, and it's getting harder and harder. I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Ideology can only take you so far if the product is a piece of crap.
> Why do you care what the rendering engine is?
then later you say
> I currently have a tab open that will just keep loading forever every time I load the browser, taking 100% CPU, until I go and press escape to stop loading. It's slow as hell and frequently freezes.
Do you not see that those two things may be related?
The rendering engine is fairly important for apparent speed and smoothness (e.g. with scrolling). These are issues where Firefox was traditionally not rated highly.
About that particular tab (which I guess you're sending a bug report about), maybe you want to try the same URL in a fresh Firefox profile?
Then I guess you were never an IE6 user.
In the end tabs are just like booksmarks, except that they keep state during a browsing session. I find it very weird that we keep those very similar concepts in completely different UIs. There's a lot of room for improvement in that area.
Agreed.
I'd not say that there's no room for improvement WRT bookmarks and tabs, but this has nothing to do with the comment thread I responded to.
Sounds interesting, which extension would that be?
in future you can just ctrl-t then shortcut name to go straight to bookmark.
yeah, it's bookmarks under the hood, but being able to just go 'ctrl-t' then 'webmail' or 'workmail' or whatever saves the convolutions of smartcomplete and autocomplete and displaying history or suggestions and such in the url bar.
Both Firefox's awesomebar and Chrome's omnibox let you go to a shortcut by typing its name
But honestly I have no problems with "regular" browsing.
The features are good enough to live with the slowdown, as others have said Vivaldi can never be as fast as Chrome.
On some pages browsing would slow down to a halt while CPU usage would spike to 100%.
I don't think that's true. There's lots of innovation, but it's in things that aren't necessarily obvious to the end user until there's decent levels of adoption by developers. Websites can access gamepads, advanced hardware-accelerated 3D, bluetooth, accelerometers, different layout engines, P2P data sharing, push notifications ... the UI that doesn't change very often, but that's only a tiny aspect of what a browser is.
Which ironically doesn't happen until browsers agree on innovation.
Opera used to be really fast, but then it started to come with lots of other useless tools (email, bittorrent client tool) and try to be an internet package
So I jumped to Firefox which was simpler and Thunderbird was a separate client. Then that started to be clunkier, so I tried Chrome, which was faster.
Much like laptop getting thinner, the gains are in the wrong area.
What I want is a fast, secure browser that can remember history and bookmarks - everything else can be an add-on.
That said, this is perhaps the second time i have seen them unveil a concept browser for an Apple platform.
Really goes to show how big a fixture Apple is in web development. But then i hold that this can be attributed to when web development moved from the computing department to the media production department. As the latter had been a Mac stronghold since the intro of the original Mac in combo with Apple's laserwriter printer.
What do you think would happen if Google changed the Chrome UI (the little there is) around?
Non-user visible innovation in browsers does happen BTW. But you dont't see it :-)
Although I believe that was Microsoft's fault, but Google shouldn't have copied it. I've lost more data to that than any web browser bug over the years. Fortunately Chrome had an extension that let me turn it off!
Is the back that backspace goes back, or that the browser doesn't store text you've typed in a textarea?
And even Opera tried to keep that too, at least in many situations, to keep the history an actual history and you'd switch through snapshots of the DOM+state--at least that's what it felt like, I'm not sure that's what it really did, but I guess it helps with speed, too. A webpage generally isn't supposed to move or change at all unless you're interacting with it, so really after it's rendered, flipping through history or tabs should be instant, even on an old machine because it's just bitmaps, really. I remember a while ago there was an article here that sort of explained why this couldn't be done or didn't work for some reason, but it was a tradeoff to get some feature that, given the option no one in their right mind would trade for instant history and tab navigation.
That was the purpose of Chrome, I believe, to monopolize the browser market and make it very expensive for others to compete and innovate google's business model out of existence.
In the browser space, yes. In the API and platform space, no. Every other browser has already resigned to just "do what Chrome does" instead of expecting Chrome to confirm to the standards as written.
Do you not see how this is a huge hedge for Google? You control the platform and APIs, you rule the world.
Microsoft used to understand this very well.
On top of that, if you have to compete in the browser space by forking off of Google's rendering engine and web platform, you're always going to be behind.
Why do you think I don't see that?
On top of that, if you have to compete in the browser space by forking off of Google's rendering engine and web platform, you're always going to be behind.
Why? That's certainly not what happened with Google's browser.
Because they can outspend you in engineering resources to push forward, and working with someone elses stack is a burden, not a blessing, if the other side moves more quickly (and forces you to rebase).
Features built into the browser that, currently, you use Google services for, which you wouldn't have to go through them for any more if they're built in?
What if, for example, a browser came out with orders of magnitude better ad-blocking built in? That browser could run Blink, benefiting from Google's engine, but directly undercut their business.
In fact, isn't that exactly what Brave[1] is? A Blink based browser that blocks ads and trackers, and includes their own payments platform for micropayments. I see at least a couple conflicts with Google there.
Or, hell, even just a Blink based browser that defaults to Bing search.
[1]: https://brave.com
The little work that gets done is done by skunkworkers, volunteers or third party projects.
edit: see for yourself https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101637
My only gripe so far is that when I click command+w, I want it to default to closing the window when I am on the blank search page (i.e. where the browser goes by default when you open up a new window), but it only seems to close the window if you have a page loaded.
EDIT: This isn't a big deal. You can close the window in that case with command+shift+w, but the behavior feels inconsistent to me (that the window closes with just command+w when a page is loaded, but otherwise you need shift).
I like your attention to those shortcuts though I think we have similar standards:)
If destructive behavior is a bit too "easy" in an app, I remap the command to something complex. I think my Quit in Firefox for instance is now command-shift-control-Q or something.
Though I have to wonder how much resources are taken by the undo feature.
Really? Not just tabs. The danger is you have 5 tabs open, you only want one of them but you accidentally close all of them, now you've lost the window with the tab you wanted.
I have both of these browsers configured to save my sessions and start from where I left off when I quit the application entirely. Both of them persist my closed tab/window history between sessions as well, so I can for example close my way out of 15 tabs across 2 windows, then reboot my laptop, then when I start my browser it will reopen whatever tabs/windows I didn't explicitly close and if I want to restore the ones I closed before the reboot I can use the restore shortcut(s) to get them back.
It doesn't seem to support extensions so I can't replace my normal Opera with it - that's a shame, I would've.
The fluffy floaty icon bubble is a great start screen. Remove all the advertised nonsense sites and pin your favourites there (it was easy to discover how) and somehow I find finding stuff easier than it was in Opera classic's Speed Dial page. On first impression, at least.
The chrome does take a fair amount of screen real estate though. Not sure I'd need the address bar to be so big and present.
It's a shame it was removed in Edge on the desktop/tablet. I would figure Edge could provide it as an option and maybe even optionally enable it when Windows 10 is switched to its "tablet mode." Maybe some day.
Incidentally, the same touch UI still exists in Edge on Windows 10 Mobile.
For instance, I'm very thankful that my text editor and terminal allow me to split panes within their window rather than through multiple instances handled by the OS. I seem to prefer having panes/tabs vs window instances when alt-tabbing. Especially if I have two browsers splitting my viewport and a couple full sized browsers. This makes it very annoying to alt-tab only between the two half screened browser windows. On OS X anyway.
I actually tried using OS X's full split screen, but that creates a new virtual desktop. And even with reduced motion (which helps a lot avoiding headaches when working on multiple windows), it's still too slow/animated for me to switch between my virtual desktop with split screen browsers and other virtual desktops with editors/terminals etc.
Finally, what's nice about split panes vs window instances is resizing. Resizing one pane resizes the others. Whereas resizing one window does not resize the others (at least not on OS X's default floating windows. But even something like Spectacle. Someone knows of a tiled window manager that resizes all windows when resizing one btw ? Looking for something like dwm for os x)
Of course, putting better window management in the OS would require the OS to offer hooks for 'new tab' etc, and then all the applications would have to be changed to use that facility instead of their own, which isn't particularly likely to happen any time soon.
* Emacs (and other text editors) * IDEs * Terminals * etc...
Man, if I found a browser that gave me expressive enough keyboard shortcuts to make using a mouse optional (like Emacs) I would be switch to it in a heartbeat. Heck, Emacs style pane management and buffer switching might be enough.
(Happy Vivaldi/former Opera user here; it's bittersweet to see that Vivaldi seems to have truly taken the "had it first" mantle from Opera.)
EDIT: though on closer inspection, Neon's tiling feature seems different from Vivaldi's. Vivaldi's is tiling within a tab (actually a tab group); Neon's tiling seems to be at window-level. To me, Vivaldi's is more useful, as Neon's I can replicate in my window manager.
I forget what it is like now.
I know this is basically just an early prototype, so I can't really be critical. If anything, it's just such an effective and impressive prototype that I already want to adopt it for daily use :)
I've went into the Mission Control state and dragged the Neon app into a new screen. It was a pleasant full-screen experience with only the app full-screen and not an individual tab, which is what I expect from the full-screen mode.
Problem is when I tried it again, it didn't work. Not sure what's wrong but this is a newly released software so I'm sure they'll fix it.
Apart from that, it's really amazing. I especially LOVED the media control features.
edit: Got it now. Go into the full-screen mode when there no active tabs. Works perfectly after that.
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_2)
AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/53.0.2785.21 Safari/537.36 MMS/1.0.2459.0What is the benefit? If a page is designed for Chrome then Opera could render it as intended and not how Webkit might render it, which could be wrong?
User agents are confusing things now. Everyone says they're Mozilla, and have done since pretty much the dawn of the web (Netscape, IE, everyone). WebKit claims to be Gecko. Etc.
Why? Because many websites used to look at your user agent and serve you a different version of the page to try and give you the best experience. So new browsers, or improved browsers, started pretending to be other browsers so that they could get these versions of the pages and not the one for their release from three years ago.
Eventually you ended up with a mess because everyone claims to be everyone else.
Which is why friends don't let friends sniff for user agents.
Except on iOS where all browsers are forced to use a crippled version of Webkit.
But I was also very confused because it was listing a lot of local files that weren't accessed by my chrome install, and seemed to have links to things like Skype messages, etc.
Overall it's a cute design remake of the web, but I'm not sure it's really much more than just reinventing the wheel for display. I did like the idea of the player section, but I felt it didn't really do what I would expect from something that gets its own section. It's basically just a collection of all the tabs that are playing media, which is nice I guess (it's the next evolution I suppose of the speaker icon on tabs), but I'd love it if the browser could break convention and just load the media content and keep that live in the section and leave the rest of the page alone. In my mind, this would be great for sites with live-update content that you don't want to be constantly spamming stuff and instead just pull the media you want.
This is Edge's user agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/42.0.2311.135 Safari/537.36 Edge/12
[1] business-wise I don't see any good reason to revive a engine dead for 4 years (Presto) or even worst, develop a brand new one.
"If you are browsing on an encrypted connection (https://), Opera checks to ensure that all parts of the site are encrypted. If Opera detects that any live elements of the page, for example scripts, plugins, or frames, are being served by an open connection (http://), it will block the insecure content. This means parts of the page may not display properly.
Opera advises against allowing insecure content to load into an encrypted connection. The best way to protect your sensitive information is to interact only with secure content. When Opera detects insecure content and blocks it, a warning will appear in the right side of the combined address and search bar.
If you do not care about the security of your connection with the site, you can click the warning to show an Unblock button. This button will allow the blocked content to be loaded onto the page, and the security badge will change to show an open padlock, reminding you that you've allowed insecure content to display on an encrypted connection."
"If you are browsing on an encrypted connection (https://), Opera checks to ensure that all parts of the site are encrypted. If Opera detects that any live elements of the page, for example scripts, plugins, or frames, are being served by an open connection (http://), it will block the insecure content. This means parts of the page may not display properly. Opera advises against allowing insecure content to load into an encrypted connection. The best way to protect your sensitive information is to interact only with secure content. When Opera detects insecure content and blocks it, a warning will appear in the right side of the combined address and search bar. If you do not care about the security of your connection with the site, you can click the warning to show an Unblock button. This button will allow the blocked content to be loaded onto the page, and the security badge will change to show an open padlock, reminding you that you've allowed insecure content to display on an encrypted connection."
Just saying...
[0] http://tech.eu/brief/group-chinese-firms-acquire-opera-softw...
[1] http://www.androidpolice.com/2016/10/31/opera-max-turns-nagw...
If you want to experiment with a new browser that also uses Chromium and has native ad-blocking, try Brave:
The original Opera had cascading, individual windows within the browser, before switching to tabs. They have sort of come full circle.
I currently use opera as my primary browser, but I really miss the tab spaces that Firefox had. I feel like the bubble concept provides a great opportunity for pinned bubble groups that contain groups of websites that I use together. I could have a meta bubble for sites that I use specifically for work, or for my favorite news sites.
I wondered if anyone had ever paid for desktop wallpaper: apparently people do http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=desktop+wallpaper&LH_Com...
I wonder if I could write a script to sell royalty free wallpaper on ebay, if all the sellers have the rights to the images they are selling, and what kind of person pays for wallpaper.
Non-technical users. I think that technical users often forget how lucky we are that we can make the assumption that often good, and sometimes even the best, tools are free.
For a while Windows 10 was basically a free OS supported by wallpaper micro transactions.
Still missing the old Opera though - I use neither televisions nor game consoles.
-- http://www.operasoftware.com/press/releases/devices/giving-g...
It looks like it's running pretty much on the same tech as normal opera and chrome. Here's to hope that extensions are coming soon!
/edit: looks like extensions is still available in the menu, it just doesn't resolve to anything.
I've actually tried from windows using the 'mac' parameter and it actually downloads .dmg extension, I don't think there's a linux version at the moment.
[1]: http://www.opera.com/computer/thanks?ni=stable_neon&os=mac
Also, what about Brave?
I'd forgotten all about brave since the launch, must try it out.
Both brave and opera have built in ad blockers. I admire the effort but in practice the opera one is not as good as ublock. Ublock blocks ads but also blocks trash like taboola, which is not technically advertising, but is far more insidious.
And ublock is available for opera, not sure about brave. Must try it today
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.linkbubble...
Good ideas, pretty sure all browsers could copy that quickly but still, good ideas from Opera.
I downloaded it. It's... interesting. It may be a few days before I have a real opinion of it, though.
* Single Key Tab Switch
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/single-key-ta...
I configured mine to use Vim navigation keys (h for left, l for right). As long as the focus isn't in an input field, it works great.
Also, seems quite resource heavy.
I'm not a fan of the giant pictures they use as representations of tabs when my tab bar fits ~40 tabs in one screen height. But I guess that heavily depends on user preference.
That's new to me
It does behave oddly when in full screen though.
Pretty amazing.
(There might be more to Neon, of course, but if there is, the video is horrible in showing it off).
* The tabs are represented by little screenshots; nice for navigating. Yet to determine how this scales with MANY tabs (I see, it scrolls vertically... hrm)
* The split screen is pretty cool; many times I need to work between two tabs and alternating between them in Chrome is generally a pain
* Videos can be played outside of the tab; cool if you want to continue browsing while having a video visible (think tutorial while visiting documentation pages)
* All the dev tools are seemingly available – sweet
* The page URL and title are big and nicely visible
* It looks awesome for touch. I don't have a touch laptop though :(
* Screenshots ... meh. I use OSXs built-in tools.
I'll take something over nothing any day.
Maybe rename to [for Mac and Windows]?