Make Tab Previews Scalable

[TeleTesselator]

TeleTesselator last edited by leocg

Hi guys,
What's the deal with such large tab previews? It's been annoying me since I installed Opera GX. They cover the entire active tab display and it's not even like you can read them or anything. I hope to have tab previews that are about 1/20th the size of my browser window - instead of 19/20ths.

There's obviously already a scaling routine that scales it WAY up, how about adding a slider in settings which will allow me to make them smaller? They're kind of useless at this size and are super annoying when a mouse scoot (to get the mouse out of the way to begin typing) happens to land on a tab. It seems to happen a lot.

I hope they are just under the hovered tab (not centered in the middle of the page) and much smaller! According to Grok:

"This has been a common complaint on forums/Reddit for years (including recent 2025 posts), with no official fix added as of early 2026. If Opera ever adds a preview size slider (users have requested it), it'll likely appear in settings under Appearance."

Also according to Grok:

"Their size is tied directly to your system's display scaling/DPI, which explains why they're enormous on a large 55" 4K screen with high scaling — it's designed that way for readability on smaller/high-DPI setups, but it doesn't scale down well for big screens."

But as you can see these are not readable at all - even on a 55" 4k monitor! Besides, No one wants to read tab previews! They are supposed to be a graphical representation of what is being displayed in that tab - if we want to read it we will click it (or whatever) in order to make it the active tab - displayed.

I also connected to my 1080p ultra-wide gaming monitor to see if this reasoning played out in practice. Nope! Not readable there either! Just a blurry mess covering the active browser page. The only time that concept seems to work is if the tab in question is displaying a photograph - but then a small tab previews would work just as well anyway.

Is there are a better feature request pathway for this (or maybe it should be a bug report!)?

[TeleTesselator]

TeleTesselator @TeleTesselator last edited by TeleTesselator

Here's an example of what that might look like - I'm sure the Opera team is better at the actual implementation - this is just a quick mark-up (please excuse the blurred tab-bar):

Of course it would be under the semi-highlighted (hovered) tab - not shown in this mark-up.

[nikolajub]

nikolajub last edited by

Hello guys, I would like to follow up on the posts above, except that I need a tab preview, when I compare something, I need a faster preview of the adjacent tab.
I don't have a problem with scaling, my tab is blurry so much that you can't see anything, the letters and numbers are completely unclear to read, I think it's time to fix this shortcoming.

[Kalinba]

Kalinba @TeleTesselator last edited by

Yes! Super annoying large preview. The small thumb size preview like in Chrome is excellent. Why is it so large and pointless! Please Fix It to be small.