Bored with Google Chrome? Fed up with Firefox? Sick of Safari? Absolutely hate Internet Explorer with a passion? Then you might just want to take a look at the newly revamped Opera web browser, now known as “Opera Next”, which has just been made available to download on Windows PCs and Apple Macs in beta mode.

Opera’s all-new browser marks a significant shift from what is one of the oldest web companies in the world. The company, whose browser is way older than Chrome or Firefox, has been built almost from scratch with a newly revamped design and a host of new features that’ll hopefully provide a much better browsing experience. This beta release comes ahead of the official launch, and will be update every few weeks with further enhancements until the product is refined.

The big change of course is that Opera has finally done away with its old Presto rendering engine, replacing it with Google’s Blink, which is also used in Chrome. According to Opera, the new architecture should ensure that web pages load quickly “even in the toughest of network conditions”.

Krystian Kolondra, Opera’s senior vice president of desktop products, announced that:

“Completely rethinking a browser in today’s competitive market is a big thing. Our new browser is more beautiful and allows users to harness the massive amount of web content they are faced with today.”

A lot of the new features had already been implemented in Opera’s Android app. Like the mobile version, some of the biggest changes are on the visual side, with the new minimal design looking a lot less cluttered than before. In addition, Opera has finally caught on to the whole ‘searching in the address bar thing’, with a new unified search/address bar. Users can type the URL or enter a search term and the browser will either load up the site or consult your search engine.

There’s also a couple of cool new features that no other browser offers right now. The most prominent of these is Discover, which helps to suggest content from around the web based on the kind of topics people are interested in. Using your previous browsing history, Opera will slowly be able to discover the kinds of articles you like, before serving up relevant pages that might appeal – a bit like how TV apps serve up recommended movies and TV shows these days. Opera’s also thrown in a new feature called Stash, which is somewhat similar to ‘starring’ emails – with Stash, just click the heart icon on pages you like, and use it to quickly compare items while shopping online, or to keep certain web pages handy.

The popular Speed Dial feature is still around, although like everything else this has also been revamped. Now, users can gather their bookmarks in folders and filter them easily, giving them more organization tools for their favorite websites.

One final change that’s apparently been introduced due to popular demand – Opera’s email client is now available as a standalone service, meaning that the client and browser use up less memory space. The new Opera Mail client is available to download now, and includes new features such as labeling, threads, filtering and tabs.

All in all, having played around with it for a good couple of hours, it’s fair to say that Opera Next is a very decent alternative for anyone that fancies a change of browser. Built using Google’s rendering engine, it boasts all of the features that Chrome users love, together with a few extras that no one else can offer. Opera has never seriously challenged the dominance of Chrome, IE, Firefox etc, and it probably never will, but with the new design and added functionality, there’s no reason why it can’t grow its loyal band of followers by a few thousand or more.