I love the Opera browser and since Opera 10 came out it started developing a nice looking interface, but with the 11.50 update they started walking backwards. The whole design looks clean the controls on the toolbar are now not recognizable as separate buttons, but part of a single gray panel. However I didn't have any trouble clicking them, so it is what it is. What I really dislike is the search function that used to be very pretty. They replaced the up and down arrows with big buttons that say "Find Next" and "Find Previous". The buttons are sized differently and now have left and right pointing arrows. Up and down just makes much more sense since most pages are scrollable down and up, not side to side. Also the buttons don't fit into the panel, they are too high, leaning on the bottom border of the panel while having a pixel of space on the top. The actual search form has 2 pixels on top and bottom and looks well placed, screaming: "Bad button placement!". The "Done" button on the right has a cross to show that it closes the form. The cross is misplaced and the overall size of the button just makes it far less visible.
Here's a screenshot of the panel. Please open it in a new window or tab to see the image in full resolution:
The image is a bit blurry from uploading, but you get the idea. They also put a zoom bar on the bottom. Why would everybody need a zoom bar on a PC? The buttons that were on this exact spot in the previous version, which I consider more useful for an average user ("Fit to page" and "Show images"), are now hidden in a pop-up menu right next to the zoom bar. A good thing would be to keep the "Fit to page" option out of the menu as a separate button, next to the zoom bar, simply because both functions serve the same purpose - resizing the contents of the web page.
Opera tried to make something better that already was good and made a few strange changes. The overall more minimalistic appearance and smaller panels, compared to the previous version create more space for the page. It might not be a big deal on a desktop computer, but netbook users like myself will benefit from it.
