Is Jon Hicks already singing?

For years, I have made no secret of my shameful passion for Opera, the little-loved, under-appreciated star of the browsing world. For years also, I have bemoaned Opera's lack of interest in anything design-related.

True to form, the Opera engineers were releasing a great product, digging its grave slightly deeper with every release, omitting to update buttons here, botching themes there and generally speaking caring as much about design as Internet Explorer did about web standards.

For years, the Opera icon on Mac OS X was an ugly, poorly shaded, pixellated affair, that looked amateurish enough for any design-sensitive user to trash Opera right away. How anyone in marketing could let the company logo be presented in such a poor light, I will never understand.

Over the past few weeks, however, it seems Opera has been working on its vengeance. When Jon Hicks announced, a few weeks ago, that he would now work for Opera, I knew it spelt good things for the company.

I did not, however, expect such drastic change. Of course, it may be that none of it is Jon's work and that it is part of a larger design scheme from the company, but it seems his trademark attention to detail is already felt pretty much everywhere.

For example, have you noticed that the icon's shadow is now properly translucent and smooth? Or that the "O" itself — a very poor icon for a web browser, but that's another story — is now properly bevelled? The disk image for the very promising version 10 release features a background image that Delicious Monster would be proud of and the Opera web site as a whole seems to have gone out of its Mosaic slump.

If you haven't yet given Opera 10 a go, I encourage you to. That thing is so fast it makes you want to marry a Norwegian. The design of the browser itself still has a very long way to go but, if things keep going in this direction, Opera may soon get the best of both worlds: design and technology.

It won't make it the best browser for everyone on every platform, it won't turn it into a Firefox or Safari or Chrome killer, but it will, finally, make it a browser with a real chance to win the race.