Opera Reborn 3: No modern browser is perfect, but it can be as close as possible

When Opera Software unveiled a new look for its browser earlier this year, the company made a big difference with the impending changes. "We put web content at the center of the stage," said the Opera team on his blog. And the first versions of the design seemed to be quite small, allowing users to navigate "without being bothered by unnecessary distractions," as the Opera team said.

Well, Opera recently released what the company calls Reborn 3, the latest version of its flagship desktop browser, and it's tempting to dismiss that name as a hype. But given the relentless and absolutely insignificant updates that the Chromium Project releases every six weeks, it can also be difficult to define the really large versions of Chromium-based browsers, hence the nickname "Reborn". After spending some time with Reborn 3, the name seems right. For the opera, this is a significant update that goes far beyond what happened with the transition to Chromium 60.

Opera Reborn 3, or Opera 60 if you want to stick to version numbers, transposes a host of features that have recently made their debut in Opera's mobile browsers on the desktop. The three great benefits of this release are support for secure chain-block transactions, an encrypted wallet that matches the mobile version, and a new global look with clear, dark themes available. Therefore, if you have not yet checked Opera recently, it's worth it to be revisited, especially for older Opera fans who still do not know how to go the rendering engine Opera's Presto to Google Blink rendering engine.

Once, Opera filed a complaint with the EU claiming that Internet Explorer was blocking the Web "by not respecting recognized Web standards". The founders of Opera (who have since moved on to something else) have probably never imagined that their browser would ever share a rendering engine with Internet Explorer, but that is the case now. And it's true, it's not yesterday's opera – there is no email client, no IRC support to name a few – but it currently offers features that make it much more useful than Chrome or Chromium.

That said, the base of Opera users (like that of all other web browsers) does not stand up near Google Chrome. But Opera has been at the origin of many things that we all take for granted and that have become part of any web browser nowadays. Tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and "quick numbering" page thumbnails on new tabs are just a few of the things that started in Opera. The company's innovation roadmap is impressive, and we need to pay attention to what Opera is doing.

Firefox, Chrome and others have long since copied all the features listed above, but for a while if you wanted to know what the future of the web browser looked like, you checked what Opera was doing. So, even though Opera may have opted for some aspects of the current popular gaming book by adopting a web-centric approach to Reborn 3, making this latest version interesting is Is offers new things that are still far from what the rest of the market is doing.

Reborn 3

The first thing that leaps out at Opera 60 is that most of the new features were introduced in the mobile version first, and then on the desktop. This makes sense since much of the Opera user base is now on mobile. In fact, mobile is an area where Opera continues to dominate the browser domain with considerable innovation.

For example, Opera Touch has managed to do something that no other mobile browser has ever done: it's easy to navigate with one hand, even on larger devices. Touch also has thoughtful features, such as a built-in cookie dialog blocker, which is actually pretty effective at hiding those annoying legal compliance cookie reviews.

I am also a fan of Opera Mini, an ideal mobile browser for limited bandwidth situations. Opera Mini routes all the traffic on Opera's servers to compress the pages first, after which they are sent to your phone in a much smaller form. This saves considerable bandwidth. I would not use it for mobile banking, but it's great for occasional web surfing on basic 2G / 3G connections.

Granted, the Opera office offering with Reborn 3 is significantly less innovative than these two. But this latest version still offers many features that you will not find in Chrome or Firefox, including the new blockchain support and cryptographic wallet. What will be most obvious to Opera users in this update is the new look.

Any visual overhaul might arouse the wrath of at least some existing users and Opera 60 is no exception to the rule, judging by the Opera forums. That said, in my eyes, the new look is really nice. It's clean, well thought out in terms of placement of features, and does a good job of staying away from the actual web page.

The new look follows the general trend that has been delighting browser makers for years now, reducing the user interface for better viewing of the webpage. Opera does not carry this trend as far as some competitors. The browser, for example, still keeps its very useful sidebar.

You can hide the sidebar if you do not use it, but personally, I do not worry about the browser that uses a horizontal screen. Even my tiny 1080p screen is wider than most websites. What I do not like, is losing vertical real estate for the benefit of the user interface. Here, Opera has become minimalist, occupying fewer vertical pixels than even my other favorite browser in this regard, Vivaldi.

In fact, the redesign of Opera 60 presents more than an ephemeral resemblance to Vivaldi, a navigator once proclaimed as the spiritual successor of the beloved opera. Reborn 3 has a sidebar of similar appearance, square tabs and a generally minimalist feel. Perhaps Opera has continued to pay attention to the recent efforts of its co-founder, Jon von Tetzchner, who currently holds the position of CEO of Vivaldi.

Although I like the new look of the opera, it is not without some flaws. Like Firefox, if you open more tabs than is planned on the screen, it scrolls them on the screen. Although I realize that a lot of people like this (judging by Opera's user forums), it drives me crazy – keep on reducing the tabs.

On the positive side, Opera's menu of tabs in the toolbar, with its large preview images of the tab currently flown over, is amazing to quickly find this needle in a haystack. What would be even better is that it can be activated and navigated with the keyboard.

The two other notable improvements to the redesign of Opera 60 are two new buttons in the menu bar, one for the "Easy Setup" menu and the other for the Snapshot tool. The easy setup menu previously lived on the start page. Moving it to the toolbar means that most things you would like to change regularly – theme, clearing browser data, enabling / disabling the sidebar, and so on. – are only one click away. This is useful because the settings page of Opera, although not as labyrinthine as that of Vivaldi, remains voluminous. Finding what you want can take a minute.

The instant tool is another nice way to have easy access, though, for those who do not make huge amounts of web searches, it might prove less useful.

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