Opera Neon

Opera’s "browser of the future" has round tabs, a visual tab bar on the right hand side, a built-in screen capture tool that takes screenshots and saves them in a gallery, a handy split screen mode that displays two websites side-by-side, a player panel that presents all the tabs that are currently playing music and videos, a function that pops videos out of the browser and gives them their own floating, resizable window, and cool-looking interface that uses your desktop wallpaper as its background image.

What Neon doesn’t have is a built-in VPN and native ad-blocking capabilities. For those, you’ll have to stick with the regular Opera browser.

Opera released Neon in January 2017. It is the company’s first ever concept browser, a browser that’s meant to give you a glimpse into the future of desktop browsers. “Web browsers of today are basically from the last millennium, a time when the web was full of documents and pages,” said Krystian Kolondra, Head of Opera browser. “With the Opera Neon project, we want to show people our vision for the future of the web.”

Opera Neon is available for free for Windows and Mac. To get it up and running on a Windows-powered PC, you’ll have to complete a standard installation procedure. This means you’ll have to download an installer, run it, and follow the instructions it presents. Once the setup wizard is done and you launch Neon, the browser will ask if you want it to make it your default browser.

Neon uses your desktop wallpaper as the background image for its interface. The Speed Dial features large, round icons; above it there’s a completely new omnibox that supports top search engines and open search. On the right there’s a visual tab bar that lists all open tabs. And in the upper left hand side there’s a panel that’s home to a video player, a screen capture tool, a gallery that lists all your screen captures, and a download manager.

Neon is a first for Opera. It is the company’s first ever concept browser and that alone should be reason enough for you to get it. If it isn’t, then keep in mind that Neon has a great-looking interface, a video pop-out function, a snap-to-gallery tool, and more.