Opera Neon concept browser

They should bring this to tablets! Tabs on the side would be a natural fit -- your fingers naturally rest near the side of the touchscreen.

I am generally pretty hesitant to change browsers, but I actually really like the feel of this. It's super clean and the keyboard shortcuts are the same as what I'm used to so it seems like it should be an easy switch. Definitely something worth looking at. I'll probably try this out over the next few weeks.

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).

This makes a little more sense for what I saw with the downloads history when I installed it.

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.

It does save the original URL with the screenshot, which I guess is convenient. I prefer Firefox's version which lets you snap individual elements precisely, but it's hard to use. ("Inspect element", then right-click the node and "screenshot node".) They do have an experimental first-party extension called Page Shot that makes this easier to use, and adds full-text search to boot! https://testpilot.firefox.com/

I used Vivaldi for a couple of months. Plenty of goodness, and one major showstopper: it's slow. It's so very sluggish and slow. Something as trivial as tearing a tab off a window would take several seconds. Switching between tabs was laggy as well, once there were many. Every other browser felt blazingly fast after that. That's a pity since this type of issues usually indicates some deeper design problems that won't be easily fixable.