The world of web browsers is divided across some deep fault lines. On one hand, you have Chrome and Safari, which are clearly segregated across ecosystems and command the lion’s share of the market. Edge is a distant third, while Firefox and Brave are mostly tied to small enthusiast communities.
Then we have new entrants like Arc, which are trying to radically reimagine the concept of a web browser. Smushed between the big players and small fish, we have the Opera browser. It has been around for a while, but in the past couple of years, it has really picked up the pace of innovation.
I was skeptical, but after using it for a few months, Opera managed to ease my workflow in more ways than I expected. It even served conveniences that I didn’t know I needed in the first place. The seamless import of browser data from Chrome definitely helped, and the fact that it supports Chrome extensions natively was all I needed to give it a chance.
It was the right decision.
Tab management is dramatically better
Browsers can quickly evolve into clutter, especially if you are someone who tries to work across different apps and keep things tethered to web versions. There are benefits to either approach, but I personally avoid apps to save the added burden on the processor and memory.
But tabs and tab groups can only take you so far. Opera offers a respite with a neat combination of Workspaces and Tab Islands. Think of them as User Profiles and Tab Groups on Chrome, but executed in a far more convenient fashion.
Workspaces are essentially tab containers existing in the same window. You can assign a different name to every workspace, each with its own set of browser tabs and tab groups. The biggest benefit is that you can switch between workspaces seamlessly, instead of having to deal with window switching shortcuts in other browsers.
Window resizing and switching become a hassle, especially when you are working on a limited screen space, like a laptop. In Opera, Workspaces live on the left sidebar, vertically aligned and coded with their own unique symbol for quick identification.
If you think dragging the cursor and clicking on a sidebar icon is still cumbersome, well, you can easily create a shortcut. I worked across four workspaces and assigned them a shortcut (control + X), inspired by the initial letter for each workspace.
In my case, my Digital Trends workspace is separated across tabs for WordPress, Teams, Sheets, Asana, and Reddit. For news gathering, I have a separate workspace, where tabs are grouped for wire services, science press releases, official blog posts, and an X feed.
Likewise, I put my science reporting duties in another tab, separated across different research blogs, newsrooms, an email instance for embargoed material, and so on.
Just like Chrome or Edge, Opera also does tab groups. The company calls them Islands. Quirky naming aside, the nicer part about tab management on Opera is that you can take action across multiple tabs in one go. Thanks to shift-select, you can move or rearrange multiple tabs across different groups easily.
A mighty Sidebar
One of the biggest strengths of Opera is organization. The excellent vertical sidebar is home to your workspaces, as well as communication apps. In its current shape, the Messengers section of the side bar can host personal messaging platforms, social media, and workplace chats.
It is also home to Slack, Discord, Telegram, and WhatsApp for communication. You can access X, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger, too. It’s a fantastic solution to keep an eye on important communication without having to deal with app or tab switching.
What I love the most is that without the sidebar, I would usually have to pick up my phone to check the chatter across these apps, especially those involving personal communications. The Spotify integration also comes in handy for controlling the music playback.
As a journalist, social media is the bane of my existence. On one hand, it’s a central part of my news-gathering duties. I stay on top of the news cycle through a curated feed, assess the audience sentiments around events, reach out to experts, and connect with sources through X.
But it doesn’t take long for a quick feed check to turn into a full-blown doom-scrolling loop on my phone, which quickly spills over into other apps, as well. Using these apps on a desktop screen makes them a lot less appealing, so there’s that benefit, as well.
But the sidebar is not limited to the aforementioned apps. Opera also offers an experimental feature that lets you add any web platform to the sidebar. Whatever sites Opera doesn’t natively support, I quickly added them to the messenger section on the sidebar.
Reddit and Microsoft Teams were my top picks. I also had a Threads instance hanging in there for a moment, but quickly freed the spot in favor of other tools, such as Pinboards and bookmarks.
A truly useful AI
This is a controversial entry, but bear with me. Opera’s sidebar already comes with a quick-access ChatGPT integration. The browser, however, also offers its own AI agent called Aria, which is just a keyboard shortcut away.
It can tap into OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini 2.0 language models, and Google’s Imagen 3 kit for image generation. To begin with, you don’t need to create an account or sign up for it. It can, however, do a lot more than your typical AI chatbot.
Take, for instance, tab management. You can tell the AI to group together tabs from a certain website or a specific topic, and the Aria AI will comply. You can just type the command in natural language, and don’t have to deal with any magical spells or shortcuts to pull it off.
Likewise, it can handle other chores such as saving one or a certain group of tabs into a bookmark, deleting, saving, or pinning them. It feels pretty fantastic to see it all in action, especially when you are dealing with a dozen or more, scattered across the browser tab field.
“Close all Reddit tabs.” That’s all it took to wipe my Reddit research tabs off the browser window’s face in merely two seconds.
Likewise, it makes quick work of grouping together tabs into an island, saving the tab session, and more. It can even pick up context-aware commands, “like tabs with PDF” or “tabs with active video.”
Aria also has different modes. For example, it can summarize the contents of any active webpage and answer queries based on it in a non-intrusive manner. You can summon it for a quick burst of information, or fact check, and get a detailed response with source links without ever having to open another tab
Aria can also be summoned from the sidebar, where it can handle image generation, analyzing media files uploaded by users, and all the usual chatbot duties such as composing content, brainstorming, and more. You know, the usual ChatGPT shebang!
A tall showcase of tiny perks
Opera offers a whole bunch of other features that are hard to find elsewhere. For example, I love the free built-in VPN feature. It is seamlessly integrated within the URL bar, lets you pick the optimum location, control its connection behavior on browser launch, and make bypass rules.
It also offers its own file manager dashboard, where you can upload files required for quick access, somewhat like a clipboard. The built-in unit converter is also an underrated perk. For someone who works in different time zones and fights teammates over US vs imperial units, this is a mighty tool.
Opera’s screenshot tool is also quite rewarding, as it lets you add text, spice things up with stickers, draw over images in a unified hub, or directly convert them into a PDF. If you work across more tabs than you care to count, the universal in-tab search system is a godsend. The native ad-blocker also does a fantastic job.
I have been pushing Opera’s desktop version on my Mac for the past few months, and have grown to like it more than I expected. I was more surprised because it is functionally superior, which is quite an achievement in itself because it’s built atop the same foundations as Chrome.
Another core benefit is that the experience across Windows and macOS is uniform, so you likely won’t be missing out on any features due to the platform gap. I wish I had tried it sooner, but I can confidently recommend it to folks who seek to try something new, exciting, and practically rewarding.