Have you ever checked how many tabs you have open in your phone’s browser? If it’s a lot, then this update to our flagship browser for Android is for you. As tab hoarders ourselves, we realize it can be hard to keep track of all the webpages we open with our mobile devices on a daily basis. You’re saving that link for later to get back to it later – you either do or you don’t, but the tab stays. As time goes by the tabs multiply, and before you know it you’re dealing with an overwhelming sea of tabs on your phone.

Today, we’re putting an end to this problem: Opera for Android version 89 completely revamps the tab management system within the browser, making it easier for you to navigate your tabs without becoming frustrated. You asked for this and we listened, and today we’re happy to deliver a tab management system with the following capabilities:

• Tab layout customization
• Tab Islands (tab grouping)
• Undo and find all recently closed tabs
• Search to find tabs
• Mute tabs

After crunching the numbers, we understood that around 15% of you have 15 or more tabs open at all times on your Android device – actually, 25% of you have more than 30 tabs open at any one time! That’s a lot of people having to deal with a tab overload in their mobile browsers. That’s why with this update, we’re giving you a way to bring some order to those unruly tabs.

In this post we’re going to go over every single new feature in Opera for Android version 89 and how to use each one on a daily basis. We’ll also take a minute to dive into the most recent Aria browser AI update. Let’s get started!

Your own view: Tab layout customization

The first thing to talk about is the new tab gallery layout and design. When you tap on the square tab counter icon at the bottom of your browser – as you normally would when you want to switch tabs – you’ll notice a new design that looks like this: 

The bottom menu bar has been upgraded and we’ve added bigger icons that are easier to tap on – improving the overall look and usability of the browser.

Additionally, we have added a new icon to the leftmost side of the bar that lets you customize the tab layout between the following options:

• Carousel – the classic layout you already know.
• Grid – an elegant look that lets you see more of your open tabs.
• List – optimizes how many of your tabs you can see open at once.

You can switch between these three layouts by tapping on the new icon like this: 

1. Open the tab gallery by tapping the square tab counter icon in the toolbar. 
2. In the tab gallery view, look for the new layout icon in the bottom bar (on the far left); It might look like small squares (Grid), lines (List), or stacked cards (Carousel). 
3. Tap this icon repeatedly to cycle through the three modes: Carousel (classic, large previews), Grid (smaller previews, see more tabs), and List (most compact, text-focused, shows the most tabs).
4. Stop at your layout of choice.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed by giant tab previews, you can switch to the List view to see dozens of tab titles at once. But if you prefer a visual overview instead, then you will probably become a fan of the Grid view, which offers a great balance between a visual cue and a text-based interface. 

Introducing Tab Islands to Opera for Android

Regardless of the tab layout you choose, you can bundle related tabs together in Tab Islands to reduce the clutter inside your browser. First introduced in Opera’s desktop browser, Opera One, Tab Islands are an automatic and intuitive way of arranging tabs that groups them into context-dependent islands. To create a Tab Island, you need to: 

1. Open the tab gallery (tab counter icon in the toolbar).
2. Choose a tab you want to group and long-press on it until you can drag it.
3. Drag that tab directly on top of another tab you want in the same group.
4. Release the tab, and voilá – you have just created a Tab Island!
5. Tap on the three dots icon at the top right of the newly created group to edit, select, ungroup, or close all tabs. 
6. Add more tabs by dragging them onto the group preview, or open new tabs inside the group by tapping the + icon in the top right corner of the group preview. 

With this new feature you can manage as many tabs as you want without mixing them all up. For example, you can create a Tab Island called “weekend plans” for your tabs related to your hiking trip and keep them separate from those related to work or studies.

Tab Islands is a smart feature that groups tabs automatically for you, and it’s designed to keep tabs opened within the same context together. For instance, if you’re reading a product review and open links to three different stores selling the product you’re eyeing, then Opera will automatically create a Tab Island that will keep the review and the store tabs together. And when you’re done comparing, you can easily close the entire Tab Island and get rid of all those tabs at once.

A Tab Island will be automatically created when:

1. You open a webpage (any webpage with links in it).
2. Find a link within that webpage, long-press it and choose to open it in a new tab.
3. In your tab gallery you’ll see that the original tab and the newly opened one are grouped together within a Tab Island.

If you don’t want Tab Islands to appear automatically and prefer to create them manually (as explained above), you can turn this off in the settings menu by following these steps:

1. Open the settings menu.
2. Tap on the Browser option.
3. Turn Tab Islands off.
4. New tabs will now no longer create new Tab Islands automatically. You can go back to the default and revert this at any time. 

Rescuing Tabs with ‘Recently closed tabs’

We know that many of you have several tabs open at any one time, so what would happen if you were to close them accidentally? With this version (89) of Opera for Android you can easily reopen tabs that you closed with the new recently closed tabs feature that we added to the tab gallery menu. To access your recently closed tabs: 

1. Open the tab gallery (tab counter icon in the toolbar).
2. Tap the recently closed tabs icon that’s directly left of the new tab (‘+’) icon.
3. Locate the tab you want to restore in the list and swipe it to the right.
4. Your tab has been restored.

This new feature allows you to quickly access a list of the last one hundred tabs that you have closed – ensuring that you can get back the stuff that you closed some time ago as well. 

Search and find your tabs quickly

When you have dozens of tabs open at the same time, getting back to a specific tab can feel like finding a needle in a haystack – unless you have a feature that lets you search among your tabs. This is exactly what we are bringing to you with the version 89 of Opera for Android: a new search in tabs feature.

We made a survey about the way in which you use tabs, and more than 50% of you told us that you scroll through your open tabs when searching for a specific one. Well, you don’t have to do this anymore! To quickly find your tabs in your Opera browser you simply need to follow these steps: 

1. Open the tab gallery (tab counter icon in the toolbar).
2. Tap on the new search tabs icon in the top right corner of the tab gallery (represented by a magnifying glass).
3. Type a keyword related to the tab title or URL you want to look for – all related tabs will be displayed on the screen.
4. Tap and open the tab you were looking for.

Mute any specific tab – not your phone

With this update we are also introducing a feature that lets you stop the audio playing in a specific tab without affecting your other tabs or your phone’s volume settings. This is particularly useful when you are, for example, listening to music on your phone and then an ad starts playing in the tab where you’re reading something. Now you can simply mute that annoying tab by following these steps:

1. Open the tab gallery (tab counter icon in the bottom bar).
2. Identify which tab is reproducing audio – tabs that are playing audio will feature a speaker icon.
3. Tap on the speaker icon displayed in the noisy tab – the speaker icon will now be crossed.
4. Your tab has been muted.
5. To unmute it, tap the crossed speaker icon.

Ask Aria more and dive deeper into any topic

Finally, we updated our built-in browser AI, Aria, to help you ask more questions and get a better understanding of the topic you’re asking about. With this update you’ll see a new section called “Ask more” at the end of every answer Aria provides you. This section contains some suggestions of questions you might want to ask in order to know more about the topic you’re researching. 

So let’s say that you’re studying for your upcoming history exam about the events that occurred in Europe during the 1940s and you reach out to Aria on your phone and start asking questions. For example, you ask “When did WWII formally end?” Aria will answer your question and provide follow-up questions under the “Ask more” section. So it can, for instance, suggest questions regarding the reasons for the end to war, the major consequences of the war in Europe, and so on. 

This feature makes it much easier for you to get more information out of Aria because it helps you come up with questions that you might not have thought about before – so, try it out and let your curiosity soar!

Get Opera for Android and enjoy the best tab management features

Download Opera for Android or update it to version 89 and enjoy the most advanced tab management system out there. 

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