There are some things that I can honestly say are better about Opera Next, specifically the Speed Dial. Prior to the implementation of the Chromium engine, Opera was unable to group Speed Dial items. This made it much harder to organize things, which I found very annoying. I can also say that browsing speed is generally faster, though not by much. Overall, though, the old Opera was much better.
Opera 12 allowed tabs to be grouped, again to allow for greater organization. Opera Next lacks this feature. I'm not surprised about this, really. No Chromium based browser I have used to date allows grouping of tabs. Sleipnir has a bit of tab group feature, but it is not nearly as intuitive as Opera(12)'s. Do I blame the browser engine? No, I blame the developers of Opera who made the choice to switch to the Chromium engine.
I've said it before and I'll say it again; the internet conglomerate Google has a reputation for taking the information of their customers and selling it to other companies. Granted, it's mostly just usage data statistics, but that's not to say that Chrome is the best choice for secure browsing. For the most part, the engine that Opera used to use (Presto) was a great choice for maintaining security. There were some flaws, as nothing can be perfect, but it was far superior to Chromium.
Opera Next also has fewer customization options, which, again, is the fault of the Chromium engine. Next also has far fewer extensions available, as the majority of the Opera community prefers Opera 12. However, there's an extension available that allows you to download Chrome extensions. You cannot install Chrome apps with it, but there's really no need to do that anyway.
Who needs StumbleUpon when you have Opera's new "Discover" feature? I'd go into detail about this feature but I feel like it's pretty self-explanatory.
Lastly, Opera Next has done away with bookmars altogether. It now uses a feature they dubbed "Stash." It's rather similar to Pocket in that it's essentially just a list of websites that you are saving for later. Yes, that's actually what a bookmark is. The difference between bookmarks and Stash or Pocket is that bookmarks are easy to manage and organize. You guessed it, Stash is nothing like that in any way. It's actually quite annoying for someone that happens to have OCD, because there's no level of organization to it whatsoever. It's literally just a list of websites. I've been getting around this by using the new folder-like feature of the speed dial, but I'm still quite annoyed by the limits the new browser puts on its users.
You can still use all of your old bookmarks (and add new ones) via Opera Link. Opera states that they apparently have plans for Opera Link and they imply that they don't want to do away with their old system of bookmarks and notes entirely. This bodes well for me.
My conclusion is simple. Forcing myself to use Opera Next for the purposes of writing this review convinced me that the browser still has some potential. I'm still not thrilled about the integration of the Chromium engine, but I'm willing to put that aside for now so that I can use Next as my default browser of choice. I will continue to use Opera Next until such time that it inevitably makes too many changes for the worse. At that point I will switch to either Google Chrome or Sleipnir (Both of which run on the Webkit engine.)
