Opera's restyled History page looks great
It feels almost like a (friendly) race between the Opera browser and Vivaldi right now. Vivaldi, created by ex-employees of Opera Software was published just a couple of weeks ago as first technical preview version and it left a solid first impression.
Definitely superior to the first version of the Opera web browser after the company changed its engine to Blink.
But the comparison is not fair if you consider the additional time that Vivaldi had to produce that first version.
Opera Software just pushed out a new Opera Developer version showcasing the new history page of the browser.
It looks a lot cleaner and similar to Opera's new bookmarks manager page which was overhauled recently by the company as well.
Take a look at the previous history page (still the default on Opera stable at the time of writing) and the new history page.
The old history page
The new Opera history page
The functionality of the page itself has not changed at all but some elements were moved around and the overall style of the page looks a lot cleaner than the previous version.
As far as history entries are concerned, they are now displayed in daily blocks that can be easily distinguished.
The new layout has moved the time the site was accessed to the far right (it was previously displayed first in line). The change makes sense as the hour of the day is usually not the most important value when it comes to the browsing history.
The search filter has been moved to the top where it feels more natural. Its functionality is the same, it will still display all matching visits once you start typing.
It is possible to combine that with the time intervals displayed on the left side to only include results of the day, yesterday, the last week or the last month.
The developers have added quick links to Opera's Speed Dial, Bookmarks and Discover page at the bottom of the page. Since these links are also displayed on the new tab page or in the bookmarks manager, you can now get from there to the history with a single click as well.
You can check out the changelog for the new version here. It lists mostly bug fixes but some interesting changes like the implementation of mp3 and h.264 support, that Opera is working on a new style for the PDF plugin, or that out of process PDF has been enabled to improve security.
Opera is the past while Vivaldi is the future. Opera made great efforts to destroy the once great browser and to drive the community away. Well, Opera succeeded. Years ago all my friends either used Opera as their default browser or had it installed as a secondary browser. Nowadays I don’t know a single person still using it. Why that? In short- it’s useless, far worse than any Chrome clone, worse than Chrome itself and even worse that Internet Explorer. Presto-powered Opera was great, the new one is so miserable and so far and away from the real Opera that it doesn’t even deserve to be called Opera. Opera-Presto was a symbol for innovation and customization while the the ghost Opera now provide is just lame. Opera was deaf and blind to users’ feedback while Vivaldi offers a great community page and even a nice web-mail. Rest in peace, Opera.
“The mew Opera history page” should read as “The new Opera history page”.
I used Opera for 5 years, now it’s like a Frankenbrowser. The only reason I’m commenting on an Opera thread is the inclusion of Vivaldi. I’ve been using it for a month or so. The developers are doing a great job for such a new browser. It feels polished, runs awesome, and looks good (after you get rid of the red/orange). A few minor tweaks for add-ons and I could use this as my main browser. Good work, Sorry about your former employers struggle…
I don’t like Opera anymore. I’ll wait for https://vivaldi.com/ I want to see if it will load with Wine in Ubuntu. I got sick of butt holes messing with Windows 8.1. So I installed Ubuntu in a vmware virtual machine. Working great so far. I tried virtualbox but it wouldn’t install. Got stuck in the middle.
It can’t even do sort huh? But good trajectory, it should be usable enough by 2020!
I wish Ff would simplify bookmarks. Why are there two sets of”unsorted” bookmarks?? I save things & then can’t find them again.
History shouldn’t look like anything – it should be functional. As far as i see functionality is lost – it doesn’t show url only domain. It also doesn’t show visit count to disguise editing of user history to display only the most recent visit instead of displaying it as timeline. Maybe it looks “great”, but it’s useless. I guess its useful if you visit 10 sites a day
I thin you mean the Vivaldi browser, Martin … there are a few typos in the text :)
Thanks for this artice, I appreciate it much to read also about these browsers. By the way, this morning I read an article about the Shumway project of Mozilla. An interesting topic as well to keep an eye on the coming year.
Peter thanks, I have corrected the typos. Yes, Shumway is finally getting somewhere. I wrote about it a couple of days ago.