2 weeks Ago By Robbie Khan
The integration of all things AI in our daily lives seems common practice now, from generative AI to complex travel planning and literature analysis, as well as AI in our doorbell cameras thinking the neighbourhood fox is a human being and waking us up in the middle of the night...
But I digress. Fact is, it is everywhere, almost..
. This month, Opera celebrated 30-year anniversary of , then held its latest Opera Browser Days event in Lisbon to show off the clever new upgrades and what lies around the corner with an agentic AI called which was showcased as a live on-stage demo. The main Browser Days event was just one day, but the days before and after were filled with activities and locations that embodied Opera's mindset for wellbeing and modern culture on updated , targeting users who not only focus on gaming, but also productivity and mindfulness.
For emerging markets and those on mobile network data plans that require a watchful eye on data usage, also gets the modern treatment. A global selection of influencers, content creators and tech journalists were invited to attend the fun and games in Portugal, and I have to say it was refreshing to see such a structured approach to presenting new software in this way. The team were transparent as much as embargoes allowed, but all the while being there with us throughout all the fun.
A cynical mind might say this is all an effort to , but if you know me by now, then you know I tell things how I see them, and there was nothing of the sort here. In fact, I was directly told that opera's vision is to not dirty the waters with corporate buzz, but instead just be open and let the people see for themselves what's on the table and it is up to them to decide they to download and install an Opera browser on their devices as opposed to being a default browser on any given platform out of the box. So then, we the people, are all ears! All of the imagery in this article are from our time at Lisbon, some were captured by the professional film crew documenting everything, whilst the rest are my own for your viewing pleasure.
Each location was chosen by Opera to fit in with the overall ethos of the event. One of my objectives for this trip was to see if I could genuinely migrate fully over to Opera, or at the very least use both browsers side-by-side and happily switch between the two. That objective remained the same during my time in Lisbon, but as the days went on, and after I'd spoken in detail with several members of the Opera technical and marketing teams, it became clear I also wanted to know more about the people behind the browser.
As with many of my hardware reviews, getting to know the very people running and developing things has proven to be of great benefit, allowing me to relay useful information to our readers, as well as being able to feed back early insight into any quirks I find along the way during testing and comparison, however small. On the final day, whilst sat in the hotel lobby with a pot of tea waiting for the airport transfer, I reflected on the past few days and how I'd approach putting to test the things that I'd seen and learned during my time here. I'd also made friends with others and was able to hear altering viewpoints from like-minded professionals which gave me food for thought.
My browser of choice has been Firefox for years, it's been incredibly hard to convince me to switch to something else, even though my earliest browser experience was Opera after Netscape Navigator fell into the shadows during the Mozilla Suite's early transition phase before it eventually became Firefox. I had an idea in mind, and upon my return I fully migrated Firefox over to Opera One and compared them both back-to-back. Whilst I am a PC gamer, too, Opera GX didn't appeal to me personally as my usage falls into productivity without all the theme bits, and I don't need to improve system performance any more, meanwhile, I didn't quite fancy the smooth flowing aesthetics of Opera Air either, so the main browser, Opera One, was the direction I chose to go.
All variants share the same core features, differentiating in use-case specifics such as themes or resource performance tweaking. I wanted to test memory usage first, Firefox is infamous for heavy RAM utilisation which many complain about and opt for Chrome or Edge instead for their considerably smaller memory footprint. As you can see from the above, I have plenty of tabs open, many of them YouTube, these often consume more memory as a result.
In this context, Opera One is consuming around 570MB less RAM than Firefox, all of the same tabs are open in the same place across both browsers, the same extensions are being used, I am not using Opera's built in ad-blocker, though, as I found it to not be as good as uBlock Origin which is available in its extensions marketplace, I was then able to import my custom filters for uBlock for complete fairness. Whilst the RAM use between both browsers isn't a huge deal different, I did find that Opera One rendered pages faster on first-load when resuming the last session of tabs and windows than Firefox. What takes around 5 seconds on Firefox to reload the above view on a cold start takes around 2-3 seconds on Opera One, impressive.
I also like that the compact density of Opera's toolbar icons and pinned tabs is using space better than Firefox, and whilst you can tweak them using about:config, having them out of the box perfected is always the better option, the average person does not want to start rifling around hidden config menus. Another area where Opera beats Firefox is how the start page is structured and how far you can customise it. My pinned sites start page in Firefox is extended through editing the about:config section of the browser just so I can get more items on the page.
Opera supports dynamic increases of these out of the box: On top of that, it supports dragging and dropping to group icons into folders, much like a homescreen launcher does on Android, double-neat. I briefly tried out the sidebar messenger features which I found to work nicely, all it is doing is polling the web version of those messengers, so you if you're signed in already, you're good to go, otherwise a new sign-in to that service is required. It's convenient for those who don't want a messenger in a new tab, and having them in one place offers some convenience.
The sidebar can also auto-hide if you prefer. The migration process wasn't without a few quirks, though, and some that people do need to be aware of, as it will almost certainly catch you out. Do note that the development team is aware of my initial findings below.
If you are slightly leaning on the more security conscious, and have your source browser locked down a bit tighter using a master password, passkey or Windows Hello, then the import process will not do anything. You can manually export the passwords from the source browser to CSV file, and then manually import the CSV into Opera, but only for CSV files no larger than 150KB. My export was nearly 300KB, so this failed.
Further investigation revealed that in order for the auto-import of passwords to work, I had to disable the Firefox password security (Windows Passkey, in my case) before the import process was able to bring the 1100+ passwords into Opera. I was then able to tighten up security again across both browser password managers. Opera should be able to detect the password manager in the source browser being secured and the need to turn off that lockdown before the import can complete.
I do this often on Firefox to close pinned tabs once my working with them is complete. On Opera, the pinned tab cannot be middle clicked to close, it has to be unpinned first, or you need to right click and select to close tab. People who have a tightly organised bookmarks system will find the inability to simply click a toolbar button to get a bookmarks menu fly out inconvenient.
For example, here is what my bookmarks menu looks like in Firefox if I click the toolbar button at the top of the browser window next to the address bar which is where I placed it: On Opera there's no means to put a button there, the only solution is to have a bookmarks bar which takes up vertical real-estate and looks cluttered, or use the sidebar button which can fling out a usable bookmarks menu, though the button for it is all the way at the bottom far away from the primary navigation areas of the browser window which breaks the user experience. These aren't deal-breakers, but they are things that should be user-customisable, especially considering inside the main settings screen for Opera are more settings for everything else to tweak than any browser I have seen in a long time. Those wanting a new direction in UI with flowing colours and aesthetics that promote productivity and Zen may wish to check out , in fact, I will probably try this out once I am fully familiar with Opera One, then decide which suits me best going forwards.
Again, though, these things probably won't affect the masses, these are things I notice due to how I like to use and test things, but they are still important factors to be aware of. Overall this is very promising. At the moment I have both browsers installed and am actively bouncing between them, this is a good thing as it shows just how similar both are now for my kind of use, and I look forward to putting more advanced AI commands to use as Operator matures and I get better acquainted with Aria, the AI solution now implemented into Opera, just one keyboard shortcut (CTRL+/) away from doing your bidding: During the presentation, we were told that the speed of Aria's generated responses are going to be much faster soon.
ChatGPT is also featured in the list of AIs you can interact with and add to the sidebar. The best way I can describe using the new Opera is like seeing an old friend after many years, things still feel familiar, they are the same person, but with a wealth of experience now behind them that you want to learn more about. In closing, I leave you with highlights from the trip, I very much look forward to future Browser Days!.
