It feels almost like a (friendly) race between the Opera browser and Vivaldi right now. Vivaldi, created by ex-employees of Opera Software was published just a couple of weeks ago as first technical preview version and it left a solid first impression.
Definitely superior to the first version of the Opera web browser after the company changed its engine to Blink.
But the comparison is not fair if you consider the additional time that Vivaldi had to produce that first version.
Opera Software just pushed out a new Opera Developer version showcasing the new history page of the browser.
It looks a lot cleaner and similar to Opera’s new bookmarks manager page which was overhauled recently by the company as well.
Take a look at the previous history page (still the default on Opera stable at the time of writing) and the new history page.
The old history page
The new Opera history page
The functionality of the page itself has not changed at all but some elements were moved around and the overall style of the page looks a lot cleaner than the previous version.
As far as history entries are concerned, they are now displayed in daily blocks that can be easily distinguished.
The new layout has moved the time the site was accessed to the far right (it was previously displayed first in line). The change makes sense as the hour of the day is usually not the most important value when it comes to the browsing history.
The search filter has been moved to the top where it feels more natural. Its functionality is the same, it will still display all matching visits once you start typing.
It is possible to combine that with the time intervals displayed on the left side to only include results of the day, yesterday, the last week or the last month.
The developers have added quick links to Opera’s Speed Dial, Bookmarks and Discover page at the bottom of the page. Since these links are also displayed on the new tab page or in the bookmarks manager, you can now get from there to the history with a single click as well.
You can check out the changelog for the new version here. It lists mostly bug fixes but some interesting changes like the implementation of mp3 and h.264 support, that Opera is working on a new style for the PDF plugin, or that out of process PDF has been enabled to improve security.