You know, this is the internet, filled with lots and lots of people. And once in a while you have those who are willing to spend some of their time doing something that might or might not be picked up as an idea.

Zhunusov Ruslan is one of those people as he designed several concepts of how Opera should be in his vision. Although normally we don't spend much time on these things, his designs are too interesting to just ignore. Where Opera has all the features, and recently a new look, Zhunusov Ruslan polishes the features behind a new look which shows some great graphical effects.

This skin could probably be build as a multi-platform skin, similar to Opera Standard and Sharp. It shows a favicon bar next to the menu, I would say it's a faviconized personal bar that can be dragged around. The tab bar is like on Mac OS X, inverted, meaning it is connected to the location bar, rather than the page itself. However most useful I find the progress bar underneath the tab title, that way you can really see the progress of loading of a page (as long as the tabs aren't too small). The scroll bar in the page is ugly though, bit too fat to my taste. A problem introduced in Sharp was the lack on contrast in the tabs, this concept really shows great contrast as it's basically white versus black. The idea of integrating the full blown progress bar (when you select pop-up at bottom in 9.5) and the status bar is a great idea as well. And last but not least, having a Mail icon next to the location bar with the amount of messages would really work, as you can see the amount and it's on a noticeable place. Other concepts show the preferences window, which is now just a tab, and Opera Mail showing an Outlook style layout of multiple vertical oriented panels.

The screenies also show concepts for a new web site for Opera. A new logo, modern fonts and the combination of black areas white a white middle area where the content is feels really techno new ;)

If Opera Software continues to follow the daring path, to compete with Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer, they might consider looking at the work done by Zhunusov Ruslan and hire him.