Opera Neon Concept Browser Is ‘The Future Of The Web’

Opera has given the world a glimpse of its first ever concept browser, codenamed Opera Neon, which it hopes will “properly challenge” the browser industry.

“Web browsers of today are basically from the last millennium, a time when the web was full of documents and pages,” says Krystian Kolondra, Head of Opera browser. “With the Opera Neon project, we want show people our vision for the future of the web.”

Designed as a vision for the future of browsers, it is all geared towards allowing users to focus on web content with features such as the ability to drag and push things around.

New features

A brand new user interface includes: a left sidebar with video player, image gallery, and download manager; a visual tab bar on the right-hand side and a “gravity” system which automatically manages and organises tabs.

Opera Neon also features a split screen mode allowing two pages to be opened and used simultaneously, as well as the ability to “pop out” videos so they can still be watched even when the user is on a different web page.

The browser is currently available for testing as a free download for Windows and Mac and some of its features are expected to be added to the current Opera browser this Spring.

Opera has added a range of new features to its browser over the last 12 months, such as new battery saver settings which increase battery life by 50 percent and the addition of a native VPN feature for desktop users.

There were also talks of a $1.2 billion (£900m) takeover by a consortium of Chinese internet companies, which ultimately came to nothing, before its sync system suffered a data breach in August where “some data, including some of our sync users’ passwords and account information, such as login names, may have been compromised.”

Quiz: How much do you know about the world’s most popular web browsers?