If Opera do focus their attentions on the UI (not the rendering engine), then that's a good thing. And there's so many ways the web browser could be improved.

I used to like Opera's bells and whistles. I loved no image mode, tabs, fit to width, it's zoom, mouse gestures, url keywords, toolbar customisation and alternative stylesheets. And some of the keyboard shortcuts (which became confusing over time.)

But the menu system, and backend was klunky. The app didn't integrate well into the Linux desktop well either.

Unite was interesting (they should have waited for IPV6 to go mainstream...) Tab stacks didn't go far enough. Speed dial - really - What's the point? I'd rather they polish up the bookmarking and history interfaces. Stash looks like it's just a lifo ordered stack, which is good, but lends no context to the stashed page. Does a stashed page retain it's history? How do I group pages/bookmarks - why is this so shitty across browsers? A stash could just be a temporary/ephemeral bookmark.

Is their any point in having graphical snapshots of pages and thumbnails? These just take away screen real estate. They bring nothing for me.

I think there should be focus on: reading aids, bookmarking/tabs, privacy, developer tools, and a very clean configuration - with sensible defaults. An easy way to flip the browser into an intermediate/advanced mode would be nice.

Bring back a slice of innovation to the browser. It needs to be more than a Chrome clone. I can think of loads of nice features that could be roled into the browser rather than end up as a stray extension.

Anyway I hope the clean core and fresh start is a good jump off point for them, I'll be watching this space.

Where's the Linux version?