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.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Murdoc on Monday January 16 2017, @01:00AM
There's always Vivaldi
I've been trying it out for a while, and it's pretty good so far, but it is still missing a few old Opera features that I still use, so I'm using them side by side until they can replace it completely.
But I've also recently learned about Otter [otter-browser.org], also trying to bring back the glory days of Opera 12, but this time in open source! I've only just started trying it out, but it's looking pretty good so far to me. Has real potential.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Monday January 16 2017, @08:34AM
holy crap! Otter is actually good!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 16 2017, @09:05AM
I've been using Vivaldi for half a year, but finally went back to Firefox because I got tired of the daily Vivaldi crashes.