Opera has announced a brand new browser called Opera One that the company says is set to replace its existing web browser for Windows, macOS, and Linux later this year. This adds to the platter of Opera-made browsers, including Opera Mini, its gaming-focused Opera GX, and the Opera Crypto Browser launched in January 2022.
The new browser comes with various under-the-hood changes. It has a modular design to improve the user experience. Opera says it's the first among major Chromium-based browsers to introduce a multithreaded compositor in its UI which improves the way the browser renders animation on the screen.
With the new browser, Opera has switched to layer-based animation where "instead of drawing each frame, which can be taxing, we can use affine transformations to modify the layer that has already been drawn in."
Opera One has got its own version of tab grouping called Tab Islands, which allows various tabs to be grouped based on their context. For comparison, various popular browsers such as Chrome, Safari, and Edge already have the tab grouping feature.
The company says that the browser can create tab islands automatically by grouping tabs that share the same context. However, users can also create a Tab Island manually. To do so, press the Control/Command key and click to select the tabs you want to group. Then right-click on any of the selected tabs and click on Create Tab Island.
Opera One is currently available to download as an early-access developer version. The redesigned browser arrives almost a month after Opera jumped on the generative AI bandwagon and introduced a feature called AI Prompts. Also, recently the company brought its free VPN service to iOS devices.
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