Opera uses Messenger as an excellent example: your friends and conversations on the left, and a larger window for another website on the right. The feature comes in handy both for productivity and text editing, but for web apps too. You can drag the divider in the middle to adjust the sizes. It works much like split view on macOS and iPad. Choosing one will snap that window alongside the other. Drag one tab onto another to get a prompt: left view or right.

The last important feature though not entirely unique is split screen. My first suggestion: turn it into a GIF maker or at least tack that on. The Snap feature is useful but needs to evolve. As far as I can tell, you can’t even download your screen snaps from Neon. I guess it’s valuable to take quick clips of web pages for later, but taking regular screenshots has always worked just fine for me. The Gallery lets you view your collection. I’m a little less certain about the future of this one. It’s 2017 - this feature shouldn’t even be the future, every browser should have it.Īnother media related feature is the Snap feature and gallery. It only works while the Neon browser window is expanded, but it works great as a built-in video player. Click the pop-out button to expand into picture-in-picture mode. Even better, you can see a list of all current videos open and control them from the sidebar. The Player allows you to play or pause video from one tab even if you’re not currently viewing it. The most notable ones live in the sidebar. Moving past the looks, Neon also has some excellent new features. RELATED : How To Add A Folder To The Favorites In Mac Finder: A Step-by-Step Guide Smart, New Features Everything about the design feels very intentional from the dimensionality to the lightweight fonts and the minimalistic icons.īut it’s not enough for Neon to look good, it has to bring the heat. The World Wide Web is an entire world to explore and Neon is the portal into that new world. What pleases me the most personally is that I get what Opera is going for here. Opera Neon is the sleekest web browser I’ve come across in some time. Opening the Settings bridges the gap even further since Neon runs on the Chromium browser engine. More on these in a moment.Īt the bottom is the Menu icon with similar options to that of Google Chrome. Neon has the standard New Tab icon, the Player, the Snap (read: screenshot) feature, your Gallery of snaps, and downloads. This is where a lot of the new features live.

On the left is another sidebar with much smaller icons. Drag an icon over a different open website to create a split screen - especially useful if you frequently use web apps. In fact, you can even minimize a website window off to the side to get back to the background with your favorite links. They look like dock icons over on the right. In keeping with this theme, tabs don’t look like tabs. When you open a website, it purposefully pops over in a new layer to give the illusion that it’s a window running within something like an Internet OS. Above that is the address bar to navigate elsewhere or search.

It opens with your favorite website icons floating over a serene background image. Neon doesn’t open up a blank New Tab page like most browsers. It actually reminds me of a more elegant, lightweight AOL Desktop from back in the day. Opera Neon feels like an operating system in itself. But that begs the question: is Neon really the future? Neon’s Interface Opera makes it perfect clear that this browser is meant as a preview, something that will evolve and expand over time. It’s not likely that you’ll suddenly download Neon and be able to replace your current browser. It has an entirely different user interface with some unique multitasking features and the overall experience is quite intriguing. Opera Neon is a proposed glimpse in the future - it’s where Opera sees web browsers eventually heading. Opera recently released one of the most unique desktop browsers we’ve seen in many years.

Opera neon