Pros & Cons
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- Stunningly fresh interface.
- Includes standard browsing tools like bookmarks, tabs, history, and download management.
- Good Web standard compatibility.
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- Very unstable.
- Interface is somewhat counterintuitive and inflexible in places.
You gotta love Opera, that tech force from the north, for always trying to push the Web forward. The latest from the Norwegian developer who brought you page zoom and built-in search, is a radical reimagining of the Web browser called Opera Neon. Not yet a fully released product, Neon is more of a technology preview. It's not replacing the standard browser (which offers unique features like Turbo cached browsing, Speed Dial start pages, and built-in ad blocking) but starting today anyone can download Neon to try it out.
I got an early look at the Neon, which doesn't look like any browser you've ever used. The installer is a small 36MB, and was up and running nearly instantly. The browser's desktop looks more like a PC desktop, with free floating circular bookmarks. In fact, it seems like you're looking at your desktop, rather than at a browser, since it takes over the whole screen. The tabs are also circles, on the right side. You can drag out page content like images to store for later use in your Gallery.
The interface really feels more like a desktop than a typical browser. It runs full-screen optimally, and webpages appear as windows within that full-screen window. Oddly, those webpage windows don't have an X option in the top-right corner for closing the page. Instead, you can minimize the window and then hit the X in its tab circle on the right. If you do reduce Neon's, window size, the browser itself uses responsive design, meaning its elements such a tab buttons shrink as you shrink the window.
Floating in the top center of the window is a subdued search-and-address bar, which is really just an icon and a line. You can choose among the popular search engines of the day, but I was surprised that DuckDuckGo wasn't among the default choices, since it beats the rest on privacy.
Unlike Firefox's recent privacy-focused Firefox Focus mobile browser, Neon has most of the browsing assistant goodies we're used to: It can save passwords, show history, save bookmarks, a downloads panel, and of course multiple tabs. Whenever you delete an item such as a tab or bookmark in Neon, animated powder puffs out, and then disappears. A nifty effect.
That applies the bookmarks, which are more like desktop icons that appear randomly in the center of the program window. Oddly, you can't reposition these to taste, and adding a new bookmark is a bit harder than it should be: You can only do so after opening a webpage, closing it, and then dragging its tab circle to the center of the window.
Like Microsoft Edge, Neon provides a way for you to snip and save parts of a webpage you select. This could be useful but Edge goes further in letting you annotate the copied portion, and offers slicker ways to share the result.
Side-by-side webpage viewing is something we've only seen recently in Vivaldi, which comes from one of Opera's original founders. In Neon, you can't resize page windows, but you can drag tab circles to the top of the window to effect a side-by-side view. After that, you can adjust the pages' relative widths, similar to Windows 10's Snap Assist window view.
When you come upon a webpage that plays music or videos, the second icon in Neon's left toolbar comes alive, letting you pause playing or view video in a small window while you look at other webpages.
As far as website compatibility, the browser was able to send notifications from Facebook, and it scores 499 on the HTML5Test.com site, which measures how many Web standards a browser supports. That compares with 507 for Chrome, 466 for Firefox, and 460 for Edge, so, not too shabby.
A quick run of the Octane 2.0 benchmark showed Neon respectable in JavaScript performance, too. It scored 33,354, a bit better than Firefox's 30,552, and not very far behind Opera's 34,219, Chrome's 35,841, and Edge's 37,303.
There's a big "but" that comes with this fun, cool new browser: It shut down unexpectedly during my testing. A lot. To the point where I could barely do anything online. Stability should be job one for Opera developers working on Neon. The Mac version was a little more stable in testing: Perhaps that's because Opera has built a 64-bit Mac version, but only a 32-bit Windows version.
There's reason for excitement with what Opera Neon brings to the browser table. It's always great to see new things coming from what is arguably the most innovative browser company in history. All of the basic browsing needs are here in a completely reimagined interface. There are certainly plenty of kinks to be ironed out, however. I'll upgrade this preview to a rated review once Neon is more fully developed. In the meantime, for everyday use, I recommend the more capable, customizable, and stable Mozilla Firefox, our current Editors' Choice for browsers.
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Further Reading
Final Thoughts
Opera Neon
Opera Neon is a radical rethink of the Web browser, with a unique interface and some clever tools. But in terms of stability, it's not quite ready for prime time.