Some companies settle for a video render when they come up with product concepts, but Opera has created a fully-fledged working app to illustrate what it describes as an ‘alternate reality’ for the browser, Opera Neon.
The approach looks radically different to a conventional browser, starting as a semi-transparent overlay of your speed-dial sites floating above your Mac desktop. Opera Neon also takes a kind of virtual reality approach to tabs …
To bring our vision to life, we put together a team of talented developers and designers to work on a unique prototype browser. We created thousands of concepts, drawings, iterations, versions and interface designs.
Today, we can finally show you Opera Neon. It is a concept browser – an experimental browser that envisions the future of web browsers similar to the way concept cars predict the future of automobiles.
The browser automatically highlights your most-visited sites.
Opera Neon’s newly developed physics engine is set to breathe life back into the internet. Tabs and other objects respond to you like real objects; they have weight and move in a natural way when dragged, pushed, or even popped.
Opera Neon seems to have borrowed a little from iOS, with a built-in split screen designed to make it easier to work with two websites at once, and streaming video can be moved into pop-out windows so that you can watch them while browsing other sites.
Cream floats to the top, and so do your favorite tabs; Opera Neon’s gravity system pulls your most used tabs to a prominent position on your Speed Dial. Done with a tab? Pop it and watch it go poof!
There’s also a snap-to-gallery feature for collecting screengrabs and videos, and the actual browser windows have a very clean look. Check out the video below for an overview.
I’ll definitely be trying Neon, and you can do the same from today: it’s a free download, with a version also available for Windows.
