The latest version of the Opera web browser (version 32.0) has brought some more eye candies with it. One of these new features is the ability to install and use the animated themes. Animated themes are like the regular themes only with an animated background. In many of the Opera provided animated themes, the animated background consists of actually a high quality video made of rain drops falling down, bees flying from one flower to another and other beautiful scenes from the nature. Using an animated theme in Opera certainly makes it more fun to use it on your desktop PC.
In order to install the animated themes, you can visit the Opera themes website at https://addons.opera.com/en/themes/?tag=animated. You can also select Themes from the Opera browser’s menubar and then select the Animated category on the Opera Themes web page. In both cases, you will see a gallery of animated themes and you can pick one from the many beautiful themes.
As you select one of themes from the gallery, you will be shown an animation preview of the theme and you can click on the Add to Opera button to download and install this theme. Since the animated themes contain the animation or video, they are large in size and take more time to download compared to the regular themes.
Once the animated theme is downloaded and installed, you can open a new tab to see how it looks. You can see the animation behind the different tiles of the Speed Dial page in Opera when you open a new tab. The following screen-shot displays the animated theme titled Sunflower on the Speed Dial page (of course, you won’t be able to see the animation in this picture):
Even though the animated themes look real pretty and really spice up your relationship with your Opera web browser, it can affect your system performance if you do not have a substantially powerful PC. As soon as I finished installing the Sunflower animated theme in the Opera browser, it made the system a little unresponsive. When I checked the Task Manager, Opera Internet Browser was consuming more than 80% of the CPU resources – even though I have a 2.2 GHz CPU. If that happens, then perhaps you are better off with the regular themes.
Summary: You can make Opera all pretty and cute by installing the new animated themes. But if you do not have a PC with powerful hardware, then using Opera with animated themes may affect the overall system performance.