Life as Opera One User

I have been using Opera as my main browser from early 2000 and I have seen it’s ups and downs at the browser war. At the early days Opera had its own browser engine, which caused some rendering problems, especially if the page had not been tested properly. In 2013 Opera switched from its own Presto engine into Chromium and is not part of large “Chrome based browser” family. This of course removed lot of the rendering issues and now the pages looks same as they are in Chrome. In the current browser market the browser needs to stand out with other features, than it’s own rendering engine and I think Opera has always shined at those.

Opera One

In April 2023 Opera announced that the browser (the old Opera browser) would be retired later in 2023, to be replaced by Opera One. Opera One is completely new redesigned version of the old Browser and it uses modular design combined with multithreaded compositor that should improve the performance of UI animations. One of the new features in Opera One is the ability to group tabs into “Tab Islands”. This is similar feature that for example Edge has, where you can select tabs and form a group of them to save space and categorize open sites.

Finally, Opera has also integrated ChatGPT and ChatSonic into its Browser. These features lets you open both services in a small window on the side. Additionally, there is a built-in AI Prompts functionality that offers suggestions for condensing the article, emphasizing key points, crafting a tweet, generating meme ideas, and more, all based on the current page’s content. These options vary depending on the specific page you are on.

Differences Between Old and New

The look and feel between old and new browser is actually quite same. You have toolbar on the left (if you wish), tabs at top and + sign for new tabs next to the tabs. Nothing fancy here and the jump from old Opera into Opera One is rather small. The early version didn’t support dragging the tabs out of the main window as new window, but the latest update added that also.

The old Opera with one incognito window consumes around 500mb of memory compared to the 460mb of the new Opera One, so not much of a difference. The startup times on both is around the same and they both start within few seconds at my current computer. Opera One starts automatically on my machine, while the old Opera did not. However the Opera One starts like ~30 seconds after I have logged into Windows, which is rather annoying. If you have opened up the browser manually by yourself, the Opera One will start another instance and you have two browser running. I think this will be fixed in near future, so it is not much to stress about.

ChatGPT Integration

Opera One has integrated ChatGPT, which can be used to summarize web pages etc. Available actions are on top right corner of the browser and can be triggered by clicking “AI prompts” button. I have tried to use the feature few times, but usually it just does not work. For example asking summary of this Jussi Roine’s web page ended up doing nothing. Still I like the idea of bringing the ChatGPT inside browser, instead of using it as own web page and hope, that they will get this feature working.

What to Expect as New Comer

If you are new comer and wants to switch from Chrome/Edge/Firefox into something new, then I of course recommend you to check out the Opera One browser. It is fast, easy to use, supports mouse gestures and you can use all the same extension that in Chrome. Opera has it’s uniqueness that takes some time to get used to, but I can tell you that it is worth it. Download the Opera One, try it for a week and then decide if you like it or not.

Summary

Opera One is a new start of Opera desktop browser, but at the same time it is surprisingly close to the old browser and doesn’t bring anything completely new to the table. It has cool ChatGPT integration (that doesn’t work on my machine…) and support for tab groupping, but that’s about it currently. I am optimistic about the future and believe that significant advancements are on the horizon. It is fortunate that the Opera browser is built on a solid foundation, enabling its developers to continually enhance its capabilities. The future appears promising for Opera, and I anticipate it will remain my preferred browser in the coming years.