Opera Gets A Facelift
Opera has got a new skin and its sharp. Today the desktop team released a new weekly build (experimental builds released to the community for feedback), which includes a brand new skin. Opera had its last visual upgrade as far back as v7.5 (which was released in December, 2003). But, even that wasn’t as drastic as this.
As you can see almost everything has changed. Its glossy and polished and definitely looks better than the old skin which was starting to age. All the icons have been changed. Another small change that has been made is that the new tab button has been moved to the right and panels button has been introduced in its place. This has been done keeping in mind IE v7’s behaviour so that new users feel at home. But, I am not a fan of this system. The new tab button keeps shifting as more and more tabs are open. I would like to have my new tab button at a fixed position. Another change that has been made is that the close tab button has been made smaller. I think its too small at the moment and would like to see a slightly bigger close tab button in future. Apart from this the tabs bar also looks too thick. In spite of these minor grievances I must say that the Opera design team has done a fabulous job. The skin is easy on the eyes like being modern and beautiful.
What do you think about Opera’s new appearence?
Download links
[Please note that this is a nightly build and is meant only for testing. They have many known issues]
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX
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hmmm, I will be honest here, I am not a big fan of Opera, but a change is good. Some Opera fans will be happy to see a new theme at the same time I am sure there will be some who will not like the new theme. What ever the case, changing the default once in a while is always good.
Although I’m not a major eye-candy lover. I like this theme when compared with IE8 or FF3
[...] New Skin : Opera v9.5 features a brand new skin - that makes it the best looking browser (at least on Windows). Its glossy metallic that gives a futuristic look while being easy on eyes. I had covered it over here. [...]
I’m a long-time Opera user and all I can say is “URGH!”. The new skin is horrible, I really don’t like it. It’s enough to make me consider changing to firefox. It looks especially bad in the panels. Also, the new panel button seems to have replace the ‘click on the left hand side of the screen’ feature. What was wrong with that? I used to love that.
I don’t really care about the ‘new tab’ or ‘close tab’ icons, as I’ve always used keyboard and mouse gestures for those though.
The panel’s background looks bad. I have to agree.
The problem with the previous “click on the left hand side…” arrangement was that it was too obscure and most new Opera users failed to notice the panels. Opera devs felt that panels are too useful and too important to stay hidden.
Anyway if you like the previous look more just switch to the Classic Skin. Its still present.
I like old native view! Please! Bring me back old skin! I use Opera since 2003 and i don’t like coloured skins - my WinXP is like 98.
Please - give me back old skin !!! It’s prerequisite to move on other browser, but… I don’t wand that!
Opera still includes the Old skin - its called Opera Classic. So if you dont like the new skin, you can always switch back to the old one.
Holy lord the new skin is awful. I’m also in the small minority of an-already-tiny-minority of people who really liked Opera’s old middle-click behavior
The more it gets like FireFox, the worse it gets. If I wanted FireFox, I’d… you know… download FireFox.