Enable Alternative Native Theme in Opera

The new version 33 of the Opera web browser sports a new icon that looks way cooler than the one it had before. The previous icon was a plain 2D design, but the new icon is designed to have a 3D appearance. But this is not the only thing that comes with the new version of Opera. It also has an experimental feature called Alternative Native Theme for users running Opera on Windows 10 computers. When enabled this feature incorporates the native Windows 10 user interface theme into various elements (like scrollbars, buttons, text boxes etc.) used by the different web sites.

Here is how you can enable the Alternative Native Theme in Opera web browser:

  1. Start Opera browser and enter opera://flags in the address bar. This will open the section of Opera where you can enable or disable the experimental features. These features are experimental and so may cause the browser to work unexpectedly.Opera Alternative Native Theme
  2. Find the feature named Alternative native theme from the list of the experimental features and set it to Enabled.
  3. Click on the Relaunch Now button when it appears to make the changes take effect.

If you want to see the changes that the Alternative native theme makes in the Opera browser, then you can visit a web page that uses HTML form elements. For example, you can visit the page at https://www.lehigh.edu/~inwww/form-test.html from he Lehigh University website which shows all the HTML form elements. Here is a snapshot of Opera rendering this page before Alternative native theme is enabled:

Opera Alternative Native Theme

After the Alternative native theme is enabled, Opera starts to use the native user interface theme provided by Windows 10 and renders the pages accordingly. Here is the snapshot of the Opera rendering the same page with the Alternative native theme enabled:

Opera Alternative Native Theme

This feature does not really make any other difference in Opera in any respect. Because this is an experimental feature, some users may find Opera crashing or behaving unexpectedly. In such cases, you can disable the Alternative native theme once again.