hello everybody and welcome to bull technology i use web browsers a lot
on any given day i primarily use apple's safari web browser google's chrome web
browser and mozilla's firefox web browser i love safari's integration with all of my apple devices
and its terrific password management system chrome is great for anything google related and firefox's
privacy and security features are superb but recently i have been inundated with ads promoting
a new web browser from opera it goes by the name opera gx and it is exclusively targeted at gamers
for its design and performance optimization is opera gx worth your time let's find out
and in the interest of full disclosure i am not being paid for this review
and all of the opinions you are about to hear are entirely my own unlike pewdiepie
before we get into using opera gx let's first review some of the claims made by opera about
their new browser as you can see on their website they are clearly targeting this browser toward
gamers and it's nice to see that a mobile version of this browser is available
they say here that the browser includes unique features like
cpu ram and network limiters to help get the most out of both gaming and browsing more on that later
opera also claims that opera gx has a quote award-winning design
again more on that later they also seem to really be putting an emphasis on making
switching from another browser easy and apart from those pretty vague platitudes they don't
really seem to be making any other distinctions between their browser and their competitors
but anyway i think it's time to install opera gx for testing purposes today i will be using this
2021 m1 based imac with 16 gigabytes of ram this is by far and away the fastest computer on the web
that i own and i don't play games on this computer so today i will be reviewing this browser from a
normal person's perspective good news if you are low on disk space opera gx after using it for
about two days is only about 270 megabytes in file size which is smaller than both chrome and firefox
in this review i would like to focus on three aspects that i feel are important to all web
browsers but in particular this web browser because of opera's bold marketing the three things
i'd like to focus on are design the resource usage of the browser and overall features of the browser
first we're going to talk about design when i first booted up opera gx i was a little
overwhelmed by the design in short the design is just horribly poor along with realigning the
window control buttons in mac os gx features a sidebar that has various functions such as twitch
integration hardware limiters for performance and an array of other features all of which i found
entirely useless when i use a web browser i expect the main focus of the browser to be on my content
rather than the design of the browser itself and this is something that gx does poorly
the standard themes with their bizarre shapes and colors give the user interface a clunky
and outdated feel not exactly what i'd consider quote-unquote award-winning another quote feature
of gx is the gx corner which features gaming news a gaming calendar and a deals section all of this
information can be found on gaming websites and are not necessary to have in the tab bar
by default in honesty even if i did use this imac for gaming because i do game quite a bit
i definitely would not use this feature another annoyance is what opera gx calls browser sounds
in essence opera gx will play sounds every time you click a button change a toggle switch or open
a new tab i am all for user feedback in software i think it's a great thing but i think opera gx's
implementation of sounds for each button click is at best gimmicky but by far and away the worst
design offense is the browser settings and this is something that i also have a complaint with
firefox about what can i say when you drill into a setting and then press back to the main settings
window it sends you back to the top and the scroll history is not retained the organization of the
settings makes little sense and there's really no setting to make the home page another web page
the privacy options are just a joke and it took me ages to find out how to disable the photograph
on the background of the home page which opera gx calls the speed dial for some reason um and
speed dial is also another complaint of mine i mean just look at the start page and tell me
what is award-winning about this start page where are the web address icons they just don't exist
so let me summarize opera gx's design here the design is terrible when it comes to the
resource usage of opera gx i will discuss how demanding gx is without the use of
software limiters that are built into opera gx we will discuss the software limiters in a bit
i want to test how the raw system resource usage is because what good are ram cpu and
network limiters if the overall browser itself uses more system resources than other browsers
i was also curious to see if the added quote-unquote features of gx impacted the
amount of system resources it had to use for this test i decided to pull up two tabs in each browser
each browser's default start page and the youtube home page using activity monitor we can track the
amount of cpu and ram usage of each browser first in a head-to-head test with apple's safari we can
see that opera gx uses almost twice the amount of ram as safari and way more of the system cpu about
0.61 percent i'm going to admit this completely surprised me as opera gx is optimized for the m1
chip again we compared the same tabs open in opera to this time google chrome and again chrome used
less system resources than that of opera about a third less ram and way less cpu usage
unfortunately firefox wasn't registering the activity monitor for this test for whatever reason
and so for that we'll just go ahead and give the win to opera here but the overall trend is after
letting them sit for quite a bit that opera gx doesn't consume far less system resources in fact
opera gx seems to chew through slightly more system resources than both safari and google
chrome of course we couldn't test firefox here so when it comes to the system resource usage
i really can't see any huge advantage to switching to opera gx over other browsers
finally let's talk about features and this is where opera gx can gain some ground i'll first
discuss the gx control features that allow for monitoring and limiting of ram and network usage
the ram limiter and cap seem to work well so while yes at idle the system resource usage of opera is
higher than say google chrome or safari you can at least limit the amount of ram that gx uses
though this might hurt browsing performance as previously mentioned i don't game on this
computer but if i was say exporting and rendering a video in final cut pro and i
needed all the ram i could get i could definitely see this as somewhat useful
another somewhat useful feature is the mini player that allows the user to pop out any video content
and play it detached from the web browser this is a cool feature that reminds me of something on ios
and i could definitely see myself using this on a device with one display gx also provides a
screenshot tool which might be useful to windows users that don't have a system-wide keyboard
shortcut for taking screenshots sadly in other feature areas though gx definitely falls flat
as previously mentioned the amount of privacy features is severely limited and the other
sidebar functions and gx corner feel gimmicky and are kind of a waste of both resources and space
not entirely useful to someone like me overall when it comes to gx's features i would rate them
as fair or okay so all things considered how do i feel about opera gx in a word it's subpar is
it usable sure but other web browsers do the web browser better they are better designed they have
more features and they are more efficient and well designed so sadly opera gx will not make its way
into my browser use list as for recommendations would i recommend gx to everyday people
no and would i recommend gx to gamers well again no and my overall recommendations are
i think ordinary people and gamers alike want something that is simple and efficient and
unfortunately opera gx is just not that so that's my review and final verdict of opera gx the new
web browser from opera be sure to leave a like and subscribe and as always thank you all for watching
you