Oleg's Blog

Would Opera Software, the only company that puts the Web on any device, announce that Apple, Inc. has selected the Opera Mini browser for it's iPhone?


I think it would!

Being under the impression of the new Opera 9.5 alpha I was thinking about what else can be done to improve it's usability even more.

And I've ended today with the idea of mixing features of Apple iTunes's coveflow, Opera's Thumbnail preview feature with navigating through history or through Trash can. Let's stay with the last one now — the Trash can:

Thus there is already a feature of having thumbnails of web pages in Opera and incomparable Trash can feature why not to mix them in some simple, obvious and intuitive way? The best example I've found is the Apple's iTunes (and soon Lepard's Finder ) coverflow feature.

Imagine: you have closed some tab (or even window now with Kestrel ) and realized than somewhere in it was the page you needed and want it back. Sure, you can simply restore tab (window) with whole it's history and try to find that page... What if that page is somewhere at the beginning of the tab's "birth"? Or maybe it's even not in this tab at all!

Surely, with the new History search it's more handy to do now... But it's only a text search, not the one that is more useful — the visual search... For most people it's better to remember the look of page sometimes than it's content. With that feature you could just find needed page visually, spending less time for it...

The downside is may be additional memory usage for page thumbnails

I think it would be a great to implement such ability to the users. Like on the iGoogle page. For example — I don't need such info-blocks as on the "Blogs", "Photos" and "Groups" pages. Sometimes I'd like to reduce "Featured members" block as there are often the same members there etc.