Ralf Demuth

Featherchrome

Wednesday, June 22, 2011 6:34:37 PM

Today Opera showed the first results of its project featherweight. Since most of the changes go in the exact direction I like I rebased my latest skin:

It still has Chrome'ish tabs and the more mac'ish sidebar, though. I love how Opera's new skin shows tabs in attention state however they still use too much space and I mislike the empty space beneath them. Elsewhere the new button states, icons and status bar design are a huge improvement.

My updated skin is available from http://www.demuths.de/iopera/files/skins/test/radskinc.zip

New Skin for Opera Codename BarracudaNoodle Soufflé à la Jytte

Comments

Charles SchlossChas4 # Wednesday, June 22, 2011 6:46:43 PM

Have you submitted it to Opera desktop team and see if they like it?

Ralf Demuthlachralle # Wednesday, June 22, 2011 7:26:06 PM

Most of the official skin is greatly improved. As for the Chrome tabs, I like them better than the current tabs but I doubt they'd use them nor do I think they should. If anything I'd hope they'd find something better than the current tabs that's also different from Chrome.

I assume that tab stacking means they can't be as stylish as others, in my skin I have the freedom to simply ignore that stacking looks bad. If I had a single request it would be that they'd eliminate the gap between tabs, and you're right, I probably should tell them that in the desktop team blog.

Charles SchlossChas4 # Thursday, June 23, 2011 5:45:57 AM

Are they any different int he 2nd snapshot that came out, I have not yet looked

Ralf Demuthlachralle # Thursday, June 23, 2011 6:25:14 AM

Nope, the skin seems to be just the same. On Twitter Jon Hicks revealed that he is part of the re-design, looking forward to the things yet to come

Charles SchlossChas4 # Thursday, June 23, 2011 1:48:36 PM

Originally posted by lachralle:

On Twitter Jon Hicks revealed that he is part of the re-design

kinda saw that

I remember his last work

Dustin WilsonKhadgar # Thursday, June 23, 2011 2:29:29 PM

There's indeed something off about the tabs themselves. When I made my first mockups I did these tabs which hugged each other. It worked, but when Opera threw tab grouping into the mix it changed everything. I had to create something that was more along the lines of what was already there. Because like you said earlier you can disregard a feature, but Opera can't in its default skin. What I was creating was a proposed default.

I personally don't think the tabs have to be really interesting, but they have to look as if they can contain the content within them. What's there doesn't have enough vertical space at the top to contain the favicon. If you visit a page like CNN where the favicon takes up all of the 16x16 grid it's easy to see the tab appears squashed. The tab bar is a fixed height, and there's only what... 27 pixels vertically to play with? It appears they made the tab vertically smaller to make room to make the top part of the grouped tab look good. I'd argue their previous compromise (where the top part of the grouped tab was shorter) was better as we see more regular tabs than grouped (I don't even use the feature in fact). They wouldn't have to compromise if they just made the tab bar one pixel taller.

I think it's interesting that we're nitpicking this. The fact that we are means they have so much more of the UI right. Well, the visual harmony of the UI still falls apart the second a panel is opened, but what's seen without a panel's being open is a fantastic improvement.

As for Jon's being involved I think he tweeted about that a long while back. It's nice to have him involved again.

On another topic, I mentioned I didn't use tab grouping. I really wish we could turn that off like we can thumbnails in tabs (which I don't use either). The post that revealed this skin mentioned that the "home and fast forward buttons are now optional". Weren't they optional in the first place or am I missing something?

Charles SchlossChas4 # Saturday, September 24, 2011 6:46:56 PM

strange Opera seems to be a bit snapper with your skin than the native one...

Ralf Demuthlachralle # Sunday, September 25, 2011 8:41:31 AM

That's weird because I take the native skin and put my changes on top of it. However all elements that I change are no longer taken from the Opera Standard skin, perhaps that makes it a bit faster?!?

Charles SchlossChas4 # Sunday, September 25, 2011 3:06:58 PM

not sure

tho one little bug in your skin might be when you do tab stacking

Ralf Demuthlachralle # Sunday, September 25, 2011 6:01:48 PM

Yeah, absolutely, I'm guilty of not caring enough about stacking so I never made it work in my skin, sorry

Charles SchlossChas4 # Friday, October 14, 2011 3:17:15 AM

Strange the 10.7.2 and other updates fixed my normal skin and Opera runs much smoother,

I did see a fskchk go (I rember a h in there soemwhere)

I wonder if I can get money from Adobe for their flash player is the cause of damage (yes stable version)

Charles SchlossChas4 # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 4:09:36 AM

Interesting that the tabs using your skin on 12.02 make them respond faster when switching to them

Ralf Demuthlachralle # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 5:10:55 AM

I had the same impression once but thought that couldn't be possible. Perhaps it's because they are not 'Retina'-heavy?

Charles SchlossChas4 # Wednesday, October 17, 2012 3:00:36 PM

Not even close to retina here, still using the late 2006 hardware

Some strange reason the default skin is causing Opera to lag, yet your it is very snappy