slide into your own dms

Ars takes the new Opera R2020 browser for a spin

Opera bundles in some killer UI features that Firefox and Chrome don’t.

Jim Salter – Feb 26, 2020 7:45 am | 100

The "detach video" option Opera provides for YouTube and similar videos is really nice—aside from detaching the video from the browser, it strips off the useless control/info elements that tend to not-so-accidentally ugly up your video when you pause it. Credit: Jim Salter

When the topic of Web browsers comes up, most people only think of Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and whatever Microsoft’s doing this week. (Just kidding, Microsoft—the new Edge is unironically great!) But today, we’re going to look at perennial bridesmaid Opera, which released a new version codenamed R2020 this Tuesday.

Operating system support

Opera R2020 is available on Windows, MacOS, and Linux—meanwhile, Opera Touch, for mobile devices, is available on Android and iOS. We tested Opera on both Linux and Windows, and we also tested Opera Touch on Android. MacOS and iOS ports were not tested.

Linux

opera deb offers automatic repository additions — Take note, everybody: this is the correct way to package and distribute third-party software from your own repository to Debian-derived distros. Credit: Jim Salter

me@banshee:~$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/opera-stable.list
# This file makes sure that Opera Browser is kept up-to-date
# as part of regular system upgrades

deb https://deb.opera.com/opera-stable/ stable non-free #Opera Browser (final releases)

We were absolutely delighted to see a Google Chrome style offering of a .deb file when we visited the Opera download page from an Ubuntu 19.10 workstation. Aside from initial native packaging, installing Opera from the provided .deb file also offered a choice to automatically add Opera’s repository to Ubuntu’s system repository list, making further security and feature upgrades automatic. (Native RPMs are similarly offered to Fedora and OpenSUSE users.)

For the most part, everything was perfect—except, unfortunately, for commercial streaming video sites. Although playback on YouTube was perfect—in fact, Opera brings some really neat new features there and in other sites with embedded video—Widevine DRM support was broken, and therefore none of the paid services we tested were functional.

We found (and tried) some suggestions involving monkey-patching with copies of the Widevine library from an installed copy of Google Chrome, but none of those worked either.

Everything else we tested in Opera worked very well indeed under Ubuntu 19.10—in fact, the majority of our testing was done on that platform—but the complete lack of working DRM support will make Opera a no-go for many Linux users unless and until it’s corrected.

Windows

There’s not much to say about Windows support—or, there wouldn’t have been, had Opera not had video playback issues under Linux. Happily, under Windows the DRM plugin worked fine and without any fiddling, and all streaming sites we tested Just Worked.

Beyond that… it’s a third-party Windows app. You download it from the vendor, you install it, and it updates itself independently of everything else on your system. This is almost certainly the flagship OS platform for the browser, and—as far as we can tell—there are no hitches or glitches underneath it.

Opera Touch (on Android)

Opera Touch is in the Google Play store, and it installed on our Pixel 2XL just like any other app might. It’s a perfectly functional modern mobile browser—which, unfortunately, isn’t saying much.

An increasing number of websites refuse to allow fun things to happen in a mobile browser anymore, directing you instead to a specific mobile app made by the company behind the site. Opera Touch is just as subject to this as Chrome or Firefox mobile are, so—for example—you can log into Netflix in Opera Touch, but you can’t actually watch videos there.

The real reason we tested Opera Touch was to check out the My Flow tool in Opera R2020. My Flow allows you to, essentially, slide into your own DMs—you can type messages to yourself, paste in links to webpages, and so forth. It looks and works exactly like a typical instant messaging client, but the only one you’re messaging is yourself.

The actual pairing process with your phone would be simpler with a little more documentation on the PC side—Opera R2020 just told us to scan the QR code using Opera Touch. But when we did just that, we got a cryptic “Pairing devices not allowed here” error on the phone. What? Turns out, you can’t use the regular QR scanning function from the Search dialog. Instead, you need to go into Opera Touch’s main settings dialog. There’s a big blue “Connect a computer” button there.

Once successfully paired, we not only saw My Flow messages sent from Opera R2020, we also saw a list of tabs that had been recently used on the PC. Unfortunately, we couldn’t see recently used tabs from the mobile side on the PC side—although that should work, too, if you create an Opera account and log in with it on both sides.

Viewed skeptically, it’s easy to make fun of My Flow. If you go fully on board with the Opera ecosystem, though, it seems like it would come in handy—replacing the awkward and inconsistent “I’ll just text myself” or “I’ll just put something in Google Keep” or “I’ll just Facebook message myself” hodgepodge that many of us rely on.

Site compatibility, performance, and standard features

With the unfortunate exception of DRM-protected websites under Linux, which we covered in the platform support section above, we couldn’t find anything that didn’t work or even “looked funny” in Opera. This really shouldn’t be a surprise; like Google Chrome and the new Microsoft Edge, Opera R2020 is built on top of the Chromium open source browser—so websites tend to look and work exactly the same here as they would in Chromium, Chrome, or Edge.

Opera didn’t feel sluggish or consume significantly more RAM than you’d expect Chrome, Firefox, or Edge to consume. With that said, our test platform isn’t necessarily the best for exposing that kind of problem—a Ryzen R3700X with 64GB of RAM tends to chug along happily no matter what you throw at it.

Like any other modern browser, Opera can save passwords and auto-fill forms, including with credit card or other payment information. Unlike Chrome, and like Edge, it does not auto-detect credit card numbers and offer to save them for you—if that’s something you want to do, you need to go into Opera’s settings and enter your cards there.

If you create a free Opera account, you can sync passwords and history between browsers. Even without an Opera account, some of this data will sync between Opera on a PC and on a phone that has been paired for Flow.

Battery saver mode

opera battery saver — Battery saver was enabled by default on both Windows and Linux, despite Opera being installed on desktop rather than notebook PCs. Credit: Jim Salter

Opera’s battery saver feature was enabled by default on both Windows and Linux, despite our test platform being a workstation instead of a laptop. This feature cuts the poll rate for certain Javascript functions, quiesces some animations off screen, and so forth. Opera tested its battery saver feature in June 2016 and demonstrated it saving an hour of battery life as compared to Google Chrome. The feature didn’t appear to cause any problems or visual weirdness during our testing.

Opera-specific features

The Opera team’s real strength is clearly in dreaming up and implementing truly useful UI/UX features—Opera feels a little like a step into the future, as far as browser ergonomics go. Not all of these features are new, but given that Opera has less than 2 percent of the current browser marketshare, we’re going to cover just about everything that isn’t de rigueur with the better-known browsers at the top of the charts.

Workspaces for browser tabs

workspaces dialog — Workspaces will be immediately familiar to Linux desktop users—click a Workspace button, immediately change everything you see. Credit: Jim Salter

Tabbed workspaces will feel immediately familiar to Linux desktop users, since they work just as desktop workspaces do there. In short, tabs are opened in—and can be moved between—multiple workspaces, represented by small icons at the top of Opera’s left-hand sidebar. If you click the icon for a different workspace, the entire contents of the browser immediately change to the set of tabs occupying that workspace. It’s that simple.

My Flow lets you slide into your own DMs

My Flow is a feature designed to let you pass notes to yourself across multiple devices. This competes in, roughly, the same space as Evernote or Google Keep—or, really, the “I’ll just send a DM to myself” workaround that many of us fall back on frequently.

There isn’t much to say about My Flow other than that it works, and, oddly enough, we could see ourselves using the feature a lot… if, and only if, we actually switch to the Opera browser on both mobile and desktop. That’s the rub—if the feature is built into a browser you already use everywhere, it’s convenient, easy to find, and liable to be just where you want it to be. But if you aren’t all-in on Opera on both mobile and desktop, it’s probably not going to do much for you.

Opera’s built-in free VPN

Opera offers a free VPN with unlimited bandwidth to anyone who wants to use one. On the plus side, it’s free and reasonably fast. On the minus side—and unlike full-system VPNs like OpenVPN or WireGuard—it only covers things done inside Opera itself—so it won’t protect you from anything sketchy going on with other apps that might not use HTTPS for their own communications.

We also encountered some funkiness with language settings while testing browsing with the VPN feature enabled. Google presented us with a Cyrillic language log-in prompt for Google Calendar, even though the VPN’s IP address was apparently geolocated somewhere in Virginia. For the most part, everything worked, and although there was an evident slowdown, it wasn’t horrible.

The best part about Opera’s VPN—aside from being free and unlimited in bandwidth—is how easy it is to enable, disable, and see. Much like the HTTPS lock icon we’re accustomed to in browser address bars, Opera adds a VPN icon. If it’s lit up solid blue, you’re using the VPN. If it’s showing in fine black text on a white background, it’s off. Simple.

Snapshots

If you want to grab a quick picture of what’s happening in a webpage, all you have to do is click the camera icon in Opera’s address bar. You can capture the entire screen, save the entire page as a PDF, or click inside the page to draw a bounding box and screenshot only a piece of it.

We really liked the bounding box tool. All you do is start dragging inside the page; whatever’s inside the box is full brightness and the rest of the page is grayed out. This makes seeing exactly what you’re doing very easy. After selecting a boundary, you’re offered “Cancel,” “Copy and close,” and “Capture” buttons. If you select “copy and close,” nothing happens visibly, but the cropped section is in your copy buffer and can be pasted anywhere.

We were extremely impressed with how fast this workflow was for posting screen grabs to an image-sharing site. Click the camera icon, drag the bounding box, click “copy and close,” change tabs to Imgur, click “new post” there, and ctrl-V to paste—that’s the entire workflow. It takes less than five seconds to complete, without ever navigating a filesystem at all.

If you select “Capture,” a simple image-editing dialog pops up with your captured screen content. In this editor, you can doodle on your screengrab in just about every way you’d want in a quick-fix editor. Options include adding arrows, stickers, or text; highlighting, free drawing, or blurring things out. If you’ve got a webcam, you can even snap a selfie and paste that in quickly and easily.

There’s a pretty deep undo history available, and the most recently pasted element (selfie, sticker, or arrow) can be dragged around or resized as desired. Once you’re done, you have the option of either “Copy and close” or directly saving your marked-up screengrab as a file.

The Capture dialog isn’t a replacement for a serious editor like Photoshop or GIMP, but it’s not supposed to be. When you just want to “meme” something up, it’s intuitive, quick, and honestly pretty great.

Currency and unit converters

When highlighting text, Opera will automatically convert between units and currencies to the user’s “native” set. This feature is handy but not perfect—for example, it correctly detects and converts “30 meters” into “98.43 ft,” but if you highlight the same measurement written out in words—“thirty meters”—you get nothing. The same limitations apply when looking for a currency conversion; highlighting £50 gets you a conversion to $64.81, but doing the same with “fifty pounds sterling” goes nowhere.

We wanted to love this feature, but its iffy detection limits its utility—as does the inability to convert your own currency into someone else’s. Google.com offers a similar featureset and does it more reliably—yes, it’s an extra step in a different tab and involves sending some data elsewhere. But it works every time, and that counts for a lot in regular use.

Pinned messenger sidebars

opera pinned whatsapp messenger — Opera can open WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in their own sidebar dialogs, which can either be opened as needed or pinned permanently open as resizable sidebars. Credit: Jim Salter

If you’re sick of constantly tabbing back and forth between what you’re doing and the friends blowing up your messenger, Opera’s got you covered—assuming your platform of choice is either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, anyway. You can open either messaging platform as a resizable sidebar dialog, which can either be clicked in and out of as needed from its sidebar icon (covering part of the page you’re on) or pinned.

If the dialog is pinned, the tab being browsed docks itself to the right of the messaging dialog, and you can see both ongoing messages and whatever you’re browsing at the same time. This is a pretty neat function, though limited—we wish Twitter DMs were similarly included.

Conclusion

We’ve been briefly excited by lesser-known browsers many times in the last 20 years, only to eventually gravitate back to the most comfortable of the big, common options. But the tide may be turning for lesser-known options like Opera. Using the same Chromium open source browser upstream as Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge do, there aren’t likely to be many compatibility surprises—at least for Windows and Mac users.

The Good

Opera feels both fast and familiar (enough) for anyone accustomed to Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Firefox
First-rate Linux installation and update experience
The stand-out features feel immediately useful—Snapshot, VPN, Workspaces, pinned Messengers, and My Flow all fit very neatly and obviously into our existing workflows
Chromium upstream base means sites render familiarly and accurately to Chrome or Edge users
Battery saver feature makes bloated sites feel less bloated and wasteful, even on a desktop

The Bad

Unit and currency conversion is still a little wonky and limited
DRM is completely non-functional on Linux

The Ugly

Many Linux users won’t care about broken DRM for philosophical reasons—but they won’t use a non-Libre browser, for the same philosophical reasons

Listing image: Jim Salter

Jim Salter Former Technology Reporter

Jim is an author, podcaster, mercenary sysadmin, coder, and father of three—not necessarily in that order.

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