My first working week with Opera Reborn

Ivan Novikov

Jun 20, 2017·1 min read

So, last Monday I changed my Chrome to the new Opera. It was an experiment to feel how is it “really” different from Chrome. I should mention before writing this post two important things about my background:

1. I was an Opera user since 2003 to 2010 and then moved to Chrome because of the many rendering problems. I used it just because of built in mail client.
2. I’m a Linux user, therefore can’t able to compare Opera with Safari or Edge.

Let me please summarize all the results together.

Good things:

1. Built-in VPN is totally free, you can choose several regions: US, Canada, Germany, Singapore, Netherlands
2. Battery Saver function works well (+01:13H browsing time on my X1 Yoga 2016)
3. Tabs preview while switching is definitely useful feature
4. Personal news feature helps save my time while reading a lot of newsletters

Bad things:

1. Extensions marketplace is poor yet. For example, there is no Grammarly
2. Built-in clients for Messenger, WhatsApp and Telegram are just a web versions, not native. Look and work strange sometimes, for example, Messenger extension have a horizontal scrollbar.

Similar to Chrome things:

1. CPU and memory usage. I tried to run some tests on the same tabs opened and received the same results.
2. Usability.

I’ll update this article after one month of everyday Opera using. Keep in touch!