The Emperor’s New Clothes

Opera’s default user interface hasn’t changed dramatically since Opera 8. All this is about to change with the upcoming release of Opera 9.5 (Code-named Kestrel). Today marks the first public outing of this all-new UI.

The development of the new skin has been running in parallel with the development of Kestrel, but has been kept secret, even from many Opera employees. The inspiration for the new skin is clear. As Johan Borg puts it on the Desktop Team blog:

If one word should describe the new look, it would be Sharp. We wanted to create a skin with clean lines and clear icons, inspired by the intuitive symbols you can expect at an airport and in line with our Scandinavian heritage. This also better matches the look and feel we introduced on the Wii and refine in Opera 9.5 for Windows Mobile.

As a frequent visitor to airports (See Oslo Gardermoen in some of opera’s product pages), I can see some of this inspiration show through. The tab bar is the most visually distinct part of the new theme, and could become somewhat of a trademark visual clue. With a dark glossy strip, and two arrows—which make up the new tab and trash can buttons—always pointing forward, it certainly stands out. This visual trick reminds me of the arrow in the Fedex logo.

The panels button on the right hand side makes it much easier to discover and open the panels, especially on Mac where the previous opening strip was disabled due to not running applications in full screen mode. On Mac however, the tab bar remains visually the same as the previous Kestrel skin, with the updated icon positions.

The rest of the interface is toned down and understated, in swathes of grey. I think this works best for the icons on the status bar, where the grey icons don’t call out for attention and steal your eyes focus. The camera icon is perhaps one of the nicest in the set.

Just like Kestrel, the skin is going through refinement, and progress marches on. If you’d like to see the new skin and download the latest build then head over to the Desktop Team blog.

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