Opera Browser – News and Search is a free Android app launched by Opera to discover and read interesting and trending headlines, stories, articles, and latest news feed. Recently, Opera launched it’s free VPN app for iPhone which is pretty useful and comes handy for browsing restricted websites, blocking annoying ads, etc. But this time, they have come up with this free Android app which makes discovering and reading news feeds a cakewalk. To improve the user’s reading experience, they have also integrated an Instant View functionality which is quite similar to Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP.
The Instant reading mode removes unnecessary elements from the web pages to provide the user a faster and distraction-free reading platform. Apart from discovering and reading news and stories, you can also use this app as a classic Opera browser but with much faster interface for seamless browsing. Ultimately, this app is a better version of native Opera browser with more focus on delivering news feeds to users.
How to Discover and Read News Feeds using Opera Browser – News & Search:
Step 1: When you open the app for the first time, you’ll see a search bar at the top along with latest news feeds and articles at the bottom of the Home tab, as shown in the above image. You can discover and personalize the feeds or articles that you want this app to display in the Home tab. For this, slide the Home screen to the left and choose your favorite channel. You can even view your Twitter friends feeds by connecting your Twitter account to the “Friends Sharing” option above the channels.
Step 2: You can select from various channels like Politics, Sports, Entertainment, Design, Business, Finance, Technology, Science, Health, Travel, Food, Fashion, Beauty, Gaming, Auto, Music, DIY, LGBT, Parenting, and Pets. When you select a channel, tap the “Subscribe” option to enable feeds on the Home tab from that particular channel.
Step 3: After that, you can simply scroll down the Home screen to view the latest feeds from the selected channel. While scrolling, you can tap on any news feed or article to read it. When you choose a feed which you want to read, the app will open it in the native web browser view. However, to read the content in a faster and distraction-free mode, you can enable Instant View by tapping the “Page” icon at the top.
Step 4: As soon as you do that, the Instant view or reading mode will be enabled and all the unnecessary elements like menus, CSS, etc. will be removed automatically from the web pages. Doing so, you can read the content in a better way and also save your data usage by stopping unnecessary elements. While reading something, you can tap the “+” icon on the right to add it to your reading list for later use.
Step 5: The best part of this app is that it is not only limited to discovering and reading news feeds, articles, etc. It can also be used as a classic Opera browser for browsing web pages. You can either use the search bar on the Home tab to browse web pages, or tap the icon on the right of the Home tab icon. As soon as you select the icon, you’ll be able to see 2 different tabs named, Normal and Private. Whatever you browse in the Private tab will be private (similar to the incognito mode of Chrome) and no browsing history will be saved for the same.
Step 6: You can also access your reading list, bookmarks, browsing history, and download history from the Profile tab. To browse the Profile tab, simply tap the “Profile” icon at the bottom of the screen.
My Final Verdict:
Opera Browser – News & Search is quite an interesting Android app created by Opera for discovering and reading trending news feeds, topics, stories, etc. Additionally, you can also use it as a native Opera browser for surfing the web in a faster and better way. The best feature of this app is that you can toggle the native web browser view into Instant view to read the content without any distraction.
