I have used Opera, Opera GX, Opera GX Mobile for many years, and I have never before felt compelled to actually come to the forums to comment on any change Opera has made, but this was a uniquely terrible experience.

I just wanted to browse the internet and as soon as I booted up GX, all the tabs were barely clickable. You can no longer use the middle mouse to close them because there are huge dead zones in between each one that won't register clicks. You can no longer right click a tab and close all tabs to the right, unless you actively have that tab selected. The browser also ran about 10x slower and was incredibly sluggish trying to constantly render animations and tweens and light gradients on every page.

So I tried to turn it off. I searched "Revert" in settings but nothing there. Under the widgets menu (whatever that is) there is an option that says something along the lines of "Show new look," so I turned it off and restarted Opera, but that did not help. In fact it actually made it more difficult to revert the update because when I watched a video of someone undoing the change, they had an option I didn't have on the righthand side of their speed dial menu. I had to figure out I could go back to the widgets menu and turn the new look ON in order to get rid of the new UI changes... What kind of logic is that? Who would think to turn that setting on in order to turn the new changes off?

Opera just continues to add more and more stuff we don't want and didn't ask for, like AI, and tab cycling, and flashing lights and colors and loud obnoxious sounds like Cr1TiKaL wailing at the top of his lungs because you hit some on-by-default keyboard shortcut to play reaction videos at max volume over top of the video you're trying to watch. I don't want or need a "panic button" on my browser because I'm not 12 years old. I don't want Opera to try to take over the RGB on my keyboard by default without asking. I don't want "background music" (if I did, I'd go to Youtube). I certainly don't want RGX to "enhance" the videos I'm trying to watch.

But at the very least, the rest of this endless procession of obnoxious, unhelpful, annoying, frivolous, pointless, and unnecessary additions didn't get in the way of just using the browser as a browser, you could turn them off and keep going. But this one for the first time actively stopped me dead in my tracks from using the Browser for the actual function I got it for: not AI, not RGX, not reaction videos - Browsing the internet.

Is this really such an out-there concept? Prioritizing user experience when browsing the internet over trying to be some kind of entertainment software? I'm glad others are commenting on it also.