Our vision of Opera 15 and its future

Today, when we passed an important milestone and launched Opera 15 on Tuesday, it's time to share with you our vision of the product.

When we released our first browser in 1996, most web users were not averse to tinkering with the browser and preferred many configuration options. 17 years have passed and the web is everywhere now. Fast navigation and properly working sites are the most important for so many people.
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This situation led us to a question that all software developers are facing at some point: how to combine the interface is simple enough to be intuitive for a user who needs a stable and fast browser that just works , with a customizable and extensible interface that Experienced users will be able to complement the capabilities they need?

The answer to which we arrived was the creation of a strong and expandable platform for our new ideas. With Opera 15, we started from the beginning and continue to add new features.

Consider Opera 15 closer

When we decided to switch to Chromium, compatibility was one of the reasons, but more important was the desire to spend our time on innovations in the browser, rather than on competition to create the engine. We had to take a close look at Opera’s internal architecture and it soon became apparent that the Quick, cross-platform interface framework, introduced in 2003, was so closely associated with the Presto code that simply replacing Presto with Chromium was far from a trivial task.

The same thing happened with M2: adding a mailer in Opera 15 would require rewriting it from scratch, which means that the distribution package and interface heaps for those who do not use it are even larger. For this reason, we have separated it into an independent program.

At the same time, we also wanted Opera to have a more natural look and feel for each of the platforms. For this reason, taking also into account how system frameworks have evolved over the past 10 years (especially on OS X), we decided to build the entire interface with system tools: we cut the entire Chromium interface layer and built a new one on top - step by step, it was very not an easy task. And what you see now is just the beginning.

At first, we also planned to implement Express Panel, Piggy Bank, Recommendations and some other parts using system tools, but when we saw the excellent performance of our HTML prototypes, we decided to use web technologies (the most cross-platform in the world) for these parts of the interface. Yes, of course you can open the web inspector and see how they all work.

Starting from this clean slate, we decided to take a closer look at how the browser would evolve: after many years, Opera at Presto was overloaded with features, some of which were more disturbing than helping users - you can’t imagine, for example, how many messages we received from users complaining that their favorite site is broken simply because they accidentally turned on Fit to width.

Therefore, to create a new interface, we decided to rely on various options for using the browser, but at the same time keep the interface simple enough so that everyone could use it. Let's take a closer look at the four possibilities of Opera 15 and explain how we came to them.

Express panel

We introduced the idea of ​​the Express Panel in 2007. When we expanded the idea and allowed an unlimited number of cells, we realized that the fundamental difference between the Express panel and bookmarks is starting to decrease. We noticed that instead of looking at a complex tree structure in a drop-down menu or panel and a difficult hunt for a desired bookmark, users rely on prompts in the address bar, Express panel cells or the built-in search to find the right site. This led us to the decision to move the bookmarks directly to the browser window, where everything happens. Additional single-level nesting, visual thumbnails and instant search make it easy to quickly find the desired site.

Piggy bank

It seemed to us that modern browsers are not adapted at all for research tasks. You open tab by tab (for comparing several purchase options, for example) and after a while you can’t understand what is there and where. Sessions and tab grouping were designed to help with this, but also confused many users, adding additional complexity to the interface. So we came to Kopilka, a vertical view of the added finds with the same instant full-text search that helps to compare and filter. This reduces the number of required tabs and reduces the number of processes running for this.

So far we have seen people using Piggy for a variety of tasks, improving the process of navigating the web, and we look forward to where it will go next.

Recommendations

Today, when the Internet is available everywhere, it’s common to lie on the sofa or wait for the bus, having fun with a laptop, tablet or phone. But what to do with this endless world of interesting around, where to start? Recommendations - this is exactly what brings the prepared and sorted information by languages ​​and topics directly to your eyes.

Compression mode

Not everyone always has a fast connection. In Opera 10, Opera Turbo technology appeared to process sites faster on slower connections, which was further improved in Opera 11.10 by compressing images into WebP format. Opera 15 adds SPDY to this as well, so pages will load even faster.

Future

It is no coincidence that Opera 15 was released the same day that our clear release cycle began. Soon you will learn what new we have prepared for future versions. Right now, we are working on themes, synchronization between devices and improving tabs.

If you are an experienced user (although otherwise you would not have read it) and found that Opera 15 does not have the functionality you need, first look at the growing list of extensions . You can find there a simple bookmark extension or cottonTracks extension , a new way to solve the same problem. If you miss the built-in notes, pay attention to the Evernote extension .

If Opera 15 does not have something fundamentally important for you, then for this we saved Opera 12 and did not update it automatically to Opera 15. And most importantly, Opera 16 will be released very soon.

We are closely following your comments and feedback, as well as all 17 years! Send us messages about errors found. Inside the company, we all have personal wish lists: Bruce nudges about Ctrl + Enter and recommendations for Turkey, Andreas presses on us, demanding an API for extensions and bookmarks.

Some of this will be released to more than 50 million users. Something is not - we don’t want to make Henry Ford's famous “fast horse” (“If I asked people what they wanted, they would ask for a faster horse”). Also, we are not going to clone either Opera 12 or any other browser. We will continue to invent and make the best browser for you.