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posted by martyb on Sunday January 15 2017, @06:44PM   Printer-friendly
from the no-singing-fat-lady,-yet dept.

Opera has released an experimental web browser called Neon that mainly shows off new UI ideas:

Opera released a new web browser today called Neon that's meant to try out a bunch of untested design ideas. Neon isn't close to being ready to replace your main web browser — it's being called a "concept browser" — but it does have some neat ideas that are fun to try out and, in some cases, you can imagine becoming part of a major browser one day.

Neon's homepage looks far different than any other browser's. Though it still includes shortcuts to bookmarks and top websites, they're displayed as floating bubbles that are overlaid on your desktop wallpaper. There's no discrete address bar either; there's just a line above all the floating balls asking you to type something in. Visually, it's very cool. The browser also does away with traditional tabs, replacing them with a series of circular icons on the righthand side of the browser, with one appearing for every page you have open. There are neat little animations as websites are pulled up and minimized back into their bubbles, but the animations are pretty sluggish right now in a way that hampers your ability to use the browser.

One of the smarter ideas in Neon is built-in support for split-screen browsing. Drag one website's bubble (its tab) over top of an already open page, and Opera will offer to split your view in two. Their sizes are adjustable, though only one side of the split-screen will respond to other tabs you want to open up — the other side remains more or less fixed.

There's always Vivaldi (1.6.689.40).

Also at PC Magazine, TechCrunch, BGR, and PC World.


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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Marand on Sunday January 15 2017, @09:42PM

    by Marand (1081) on Sunday January 15 2017, @09:42PM (#454172) Journal

    Opera Neon wipes away your desktop clutter by bringing your computer’s wallpaper into the browser.

    This was also done ages ago, by an office suite. Sun's predecessor to OpenOffice, Star Office, used to have a fake desktop that used your wallpaper and desktop shortcuts but intermingled shortcuts for recent and new documents with it. You could leave it open and use it instead of your normal desktop. At least, the *nix versions of the time did this.

    It was both annoying and at times useful, and I couldn't decide if I was happy or not when Sun ditched the idea.

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