Earlier today Opera Software introduced their new default skin for the upcoming Opera 9.5 release. It is dark, got some shiny and glassy effects, kind of Windows Vista style, though bit too light for that. In case you haven’t seen it yet, check the screenshot below. OK, checked? Let’s start the review now, shall we?



Click on the picture to enlarge.

Installation…

Not much to say there, it just looks better than the previous ones…

Reminder that it’s a beta?

OK, all finished. Let’s begin.

If I were a newbie, would probably say that this button is a print screen replacement. It just looks like a print screen button and says nothing about it’s real function.

Someone should change it. If you would click “Closed” tabs button, it will look like this:

It just doesn’t fit the current interface. Don’t you think so? Bad color + square…

Menu icons are way too dark, looks pretty much the same, are not attractive and confusing

Now not sure if this is a skin related bug, but Opera cuts half of the text when viewing previous visited pages:

Here is probably one of the worst skin bugs. As you can see, it has a little X in the top right corner

There’s nothing wrong with that. But what happens when you open one more tab? They disappear. This is a feature (same as in Opera 9), maybe limit should be increased a bit? There is still a plenty of space for the X button.

By clicking a small icon in the left corner, you can open panels (bug: when opening them via menu, scrollbar in the bottom appears) which look like this:

Icons issue again, there are no colors, looks the same… I hope they are not experiencing any kind of depression and decided to remove colors for some other reasons. Star could be yellow, little gear blue, etc. There should be some colors so users would find the one they want faster.

Buttons on click effect is burning eyes a bit and should be changed.

Maybe I am nagging too much, but tabs icon looks like an iPhone

One more icons problem. All are the same, makes it hard to find the one user wants. Forced to read all that text.

Just a small tip here: make the following button removable. CTRL+T works fine here.

If you have decided to remove top left icon before the tabs, it will look something like this:

Bit too close, 2-5px spacing would make a difference.

Status bar now has a small gradient, it actually makes the text bit harder to read. Not a big issue.

Same icons problem here:

And finally, transfers bar. Blue progress bar doesn’t match this color scheme anymore and on click effect is kind of odd.

Conclusion?

As for now, previous skin looks much better. Tabs color is too dark compared to the whole interface, (would actually prefer even darker tabs panel background if interface would match it) loaded sites text on tabs are blue (hard to read) and the issues mentioned above. I like their new style though.

7/10

Hope Opera team will also read this, improve their skin design, give me some credit or reveal a “top secret” Opera 10 feature so I can write about it here :-)

What’s your verdict?

Update:

So I went to my mom’s house (really new pc user) and installed Opera 9.5 there. Her first reaction was something like: “huh, what’s that?” After a little explanation she began using it… Instead of opening a new tab, mom typed an address on the same one. Why? Because she couldn’t find anything in the left corner (where new tab icon always was). Had to show tiny plus button in the right.

Now not sure if this has anything to do with the sight, but she haven’t noticed close tabs icon as well (old one was big and this one is very tiny).

As requested, I’m now installing Opera 9.27 there…