What Is Opera One? Will It Become The Next Big Thing?

Opera is a name that’s well-known to every web developer. Once the developer of one of the leading browsers, it’s far less popular in the post-Chrome world. But it’s not letting go: after releasing a bunch of browsers (seriously, they keep making them), the ever-experimenting Norwegians are ready to present their new development: Opera One—the AI-powered browser.

Read also: Is Firefox Relevant For Web Designers?

What is Opera One? Will it become the next big thing?

Someone’s jumping on the bandwagon, huh? The AI revolution is still ongoing, but Opera is already changing things up. And the new browser, titled Opera One, is quite interesting. But will it change the market?

What is Opera One?

The new browser is still in the beta phase but is available for download. It’s a modular browser with a specific design. Every UI element is big and rounded, and easy to find. The left panel — you might remember it from many browsers like Safari — serves a very important purpose: it hosts shortcuts for browser “apps” like Facebook Messenger, TikTok and ChatGPT. 

There are also Workspaces — a fancy name for a feature Safari has had for quite a while. It allows you to have tab groups for any kind of situation — work, social media, etc. 

The most important new element is tab islands. It’s a feature that lets the browser sort your tabs into groups on its own. Opera proudly announced that this is the first implementation of a “multithreaded compositor” in a Chromium browser. Sounds good, but does it even mean anything? Who knows. 

What it means is that you’ll have groups of tabs with pages from one website, conserving your space. It’s neat, great for smaller screens, and works better than Edge’s similar feature. But it’s in no way a groundbreaking new function.

The “AI features” was something Opera boasted especially loudly but what it is in reality is a small sliding window with popular chatbots. It’s not integration per se — just a neat way of opening a browser window. It’s less impressive than Edge’s Bing side panel, and basically meaningless if you use special ChatGPT apps like WriteMage. 

As always, there’s the promise that “more is to come,” but we take this promise with a pinch of salt. As of now, it’s an interesting concept but that’s about it. You might like it, but it has nothing to stand out from the crowd.

Is Opera One something you should think about?

As web developers, we can’t ignore the chance of a new browser disturbing the market, but Opera One doesn’t look like something you should concern yourself with. It’s a neat new fringe browser, but there’s little chance of it becoming a serious alternative to Chrome or Firefox. Everything’s possible, of course.