Opera showcases its Neon browser

Even over a decade ago there were a lot of browsers out there, a lot of unknown ones and a handful of browsers with brand recognition among the broader public. Opera is one of the latter but for various reasons its browser always had a low marketshare, especially the onslaught of first Firefox and then Chrome made it hard for the Nordic browser to compete.

Last year Opera Software got sold to Chinese investors and now the company presents its new Neon browser concept, which you can download over here. Neon will not replace the original Opera browser, its more of an experiment to create the browser of the future.

Today, Opera has showcased its first ever concept browser, codenamed Opera Neon. Today’s web browsers are getting dated

“Web browsers of today are basically from the last millennium, a time when the web was full of documents and pages,” says Krystian Kolondra, Head of Opera browser. “With the Opera Neon project, we want to show people our vision for the future of the web.”

Since it’s inception twenty years ago, the internet has become an essential part of our lives. Every day, billions of people access it using their favorite web browsers. But the internet keeps changing, and so must the browsers.

In the past year, Opera has stepped up the game for browsers, introducing novel features such as free VPN and native ad-blocking, but the company has realized it’s now time for someone to properly challenge the browser industry.

What is Opera Neon
Opera Neon is a concept browser built from the same browser engine as the Opera browser; it’s designed to allow users to focus on the most important part of the internet: the content. Opera Neon will provide users with fun ways to interact with web content, including the ability to drag and push things around, and even to even pop content out from the web.

A completely new user interface debuts in Opera Neon. It includes:

New start page using users’ current desktop background image.

A left sidebar with video player, image gallery, and download manager.

A new visual tab bar on the right side of the browser window that makes it easier to distinguish between tabs.

An intelligent system that automatically manages tabs; like gravity, frequently-used tabs float to the top, while rarely-used tabs will sink to the bottom.

A completely new omnibox, supporting top search engines and open search.

Also, new ways of enjoying web content have been added:

Video pop-out, which lets users to watch videos while browsing other web pages

Snap-to-gallery, which allows users to snapshot and crop any part of a web page and save to the gallery for later use.

A split screen mode which allows for two pages to be used simultaneously.