The Thögosphere

So Opera 9.5 has been released, and they talk big about their new look. When we talk about browser performance, Opera is no doubt among the best. But now I’m not so sure if it’s among the prettiest.

“Beautiful New Exterior”

The “beautiful new exterior”, as Opera puts it, is a path in the wrong direction. This is, of course, very individual. Some might say the dark glossy topbar is super cool, but I think it draws way too much attention from what really matters when you’re surfing the web – the content. It’s not there to look cool and pretty. It’s there to give you an overview of the current tabs. That’s it!

I don’t have made much thoughts on the other elements. It looks alright – except for some of the icons, who again screams a little too much for attention.

As for the Macintosh native skin it looks down right unfinished. I don’t see much resemblance to the OS X look. They’ve just colored it to look kinda like OS X. In comparison to Firefox 3’s native skin, this looks like a dead mule - and I’m afraid that might be an insult to the dead mule.

What about the rest?

As I said, Opera has always been a very good browser – both by performance and functionality. It has always been very good with web standards, and is one of the first browsers to take use of the new HTML 5 tags (they’re awesome by the way). Its version of the “Awesome bar” is a very neat and useful function if you tend to forget to bookmark sites that you might want to pull up later. This is just one of many cool features.

The conclusion

I’ve never been able to convert to Opera. I’m more of a firefox fan. Mainly because of some of the extensions (like Firebug and Web Developer Toolbar) are crucial for me.

However, it is absolutely a very fine browser – except for the new standard look. But luckily that’s easy to replace.

Get Opera 9.5 and try it out for yourself!