Personally I always considered it the best browser ever, although with great grief I had to hand over that title to Chrome, which has everything really worth taking from Opera, plus several improvements that were hard to ignore. It was the first browser able to claim being nearly as fast as the Norwegian big O, plus sandboxing, well-achieved extensions framework, uncluttered interface and a great attention to detail from its designers.

But I didn’t throw away Opera for this. Today I took a glimpse of what’s expected for their upcoming 11th edition, and I have to say I was impressed but not surprised at all: I expected no less from the best browser vendor in the world.

Opera 11 beta brings up several improvements over past versions. Keeping up with the competition is the least they could, and they seem to be doing really well in terms of features: better HTML5 support, smaller installer, better performance, safer browsing, secure and informative address field, private navigation mode, and a great new overdue addition which I haven’t yet explored in its entirety: extensions.

Something really new

But all these only puts it on par with competitors, feature-wise. What’s really hard these days is to come up with new stuff; unprecedented functionality on an era where everything seems to be already invented. That’s what’s truly amazing of a new version of any software, particularly web browsers. And Opera has always been one of the bests at this.

This 11th version takes tabs to a next level: tab groups or stacks. Users can manually group tasks on stacks that can be expanded or collapsed at will, cleaning up space and clutter on the tab bar. For heavy-weight Internet users like me this is a great idea. Watch the video at youtube to see how it works, or download the browser and try it yourself.

Managing stacks from thumbnails preview

This feature gets even better when combined with floating thumbnail previews. When you hover the mouse pointer over a collapsed stack, a large floating view appears with a grid of small thumbnail views of each tab in the stack. You can click on the thumbnails in the floating view to switch tabs without having to expand the stack. Watch it working in the following video.

What I really miss and I hope it’ll be included in the final non-beta version, is the ability to specify in the preferences that when middle-clicking links to open in new tabs, these new tabs get automatically stacked with the tab that spawned them. This should of course be optional and not enabled by default, or even made available only with some modifier key while middle-clicking.

The verdict

This is still a beta release with some rough edges, specially a little prone to instability and crashing. But it’s good to know Opera is still heading in a good direction. They lost too much time with stuff like BitTorrent support and Opera Unite, instead of focusing in the browsing experience. Hopefully this browser will someday get the attention it deserves.

What do you think about Opera 11 and tab stacks? Do you think this feature will make its way to other browsers in the future?

There’s no way to make it open links by default in new tabs in the background. And no, I do not want to be doing ⌘-click to achieve this. And I do hate browsers opening new windows unless specifically told. Tabbed browsing was invented long ago and most browsers do it fine (read Opera, Firefox and Chrome). At the very least they give you enough options for you to control how you want it to behave. Safari gives some options, but they’re not enough. I know this is Apple’s way of doing things, and most of the time they get it right, but in this case their lack of options and their selection of defaults is not good for me.

And finally, to make things even worse, I cannot see the URL of a link when I hover it. I do not need Safari to have a permanent status bar. It could adopt Google Chrome’s way to do this, which is to show a small tooltip in the place where the status bar would be, but only for the time I am hovering the link.

Google Chrome would be the right choice, and I do use it a lot, but why on Earth does it lack Gears? How is it that Google supports its plugin on Firefox and Safari but not on their own browser??!! I cannot live without Gmail Offline, so that’s why I haven’t been able to dump Firefox completely.