Welcome back to Ask Giz, Gizmodo Australia’s fortnightly series where we take your tech or science-related questions and try to answer them.
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Today’s question comes from David in Cremorne, Victoria. David wants to know: Is Opera GX actually any good?
Let’s dive into it.
Is Opera GX actually any good?
Opera GX is Opera’s gamer-oriented browser, with a very black-and-red gamer aesthetic and features built, you guessed it, for gamers. It’s an overwhelming experience for any newcomer. Any user wanting a well-rounded web browsing experience may be caught off-guard, which we’ll circle back to later. For now, let’s interrogate the most important aspects: performance and privacy.
Opera GX has a really useful approach to resource management. In Chrome, you can disable background tabs using up resources. In Opera GX, you can actually throttle the browser’s RAM, CPU, and network usage using its sidebar (a tab-filled bar to the left of the browser).
This sets a hard limit on just how resource hungry your browser can be, in case you want more CPU and RAM power applied to your games and other programs. Regarding benchmarking, Chrome is faster (according to Android Authority and Guiding Tech), and is just as RAM-hungry – which shouldn’t be surprising as both browsers are built on Chromium.
Still, the ability to manually throttle the browser’s resource demand may be attractive to some. For a casual user, this kind of feature is probably not all that attractive, and personally, although I do play a lot of PC games, I’m not especially swayed by Opera GX. Chrome has actually gotten a lot better with its resource demand over the past year, making a stronger argument for itself.
However, let’s not leave privacy at the door. Opera GX does offer some privacy features over other browsers, such as an in-built pop-up blocker, a tracker blocker, and a cookie blocker. There’s also a built-in VPN (with the option to pay for a Pro version).
And, finally, it would be wrong to talk about Opera GX without talking about the obvious thing, aesthetics. GX is very gamer-centric, with a design reminiscent of the ASUS ROG range, Steam, and other touchstones of the RGB-heavy PC gaming world (the heavy red colouring that the browser loads with can immediately be switched to another colour in the settings menu). The browser has some other unique bits to it, such as noises when you perform certain actions (like when you hover the mouse over some tabs and buttons) and added typing noises for whenever you’re using the keyboard (these can both be disabled).
The sidebar can also be removed, and elements of it, such as the experiment AI features, can be disabled and hidden., all through the settings menu.
There’s also a persistent tab called the ‘GX Corner’, which might actually be useful to some gamers – it displays a calendar of upcoming game releases, a selection of games to play through Opera’s online game maker (GX.games), and which games you can currently snag for free across multiple storefronts. All of this can be customised or removed.
Heck, it can even take advantage of your system RGB lights (it gave me a fright when it did this on startup, by changing my RAM to red).
And for deeper customisation, there’s even the option to install mods that completely overhaul what the application looks (and sounds) like.
Here’s the bottom line: Opera GX appears to be a great browser for gamers after something that may match their aesthetic, however, the performance advantages of GX aren’t particularly large when compared to Chrome – unless you count the CPU, RAM, and network throttles, which put a hard limit on resource use, and could actually be useful on less-powerful systems or when you want all your resources to go towards your game with no worries about the browser being a hog.
It might not be for everyone, but its games-heavy focus is very nice and might actually be good for some people to at least try out. It’s also easy to customise, and a user can quickly make it a familiar experience. It’s free, so there’s no risk giving it a go.
Get your game on
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Ask Giz is a fortnightly series where we answer your questions, be it tech, science, gadget, health or gaming related. This is a reader-involved series where we rely on Gizmodo Australia’s audience to submit questions. If you have a question for Giz, you can submit it here. Or check out the answer to our last Ask Giz: How Do Compuer Viruses Actually Work?