This content originally appeared on Opera News and was authored by Patrick Curtin
Hey all,
One year ago, we partnered with Spotify to create a better way to listen to music while you browse the web. With the update to Opera One R2, we shipped a redesigned Music Player that can be detached and moved around the screen, enabling total control of your music without interrupting your flow. Today we’re taking it one step further, introducing a new Theme called Sonic – the first-ever browser theme that reacts to what you’re listening to through the Music Player.
This new Dynamic Theme, created in a Scandinavian collaboration with Spotify, is available in Opera One in dark mode – after all, you gotta turn the darkness into beauty during the winter if you’re from Scandinavia.
Sonic takes the customization powers of Dynamic Themes – which include animated backgrounds, UI colors, browser sounds, and more that let you change the look and feel of your browser – and the convenience of the Music Player to create a stunning new audiovisual experience that makes Opera the first browser that’s optimized for listening to music.
As part of the introduction of this Theme, we’re also giving you the chance to get Spotify Premium for free. Read on for details!
Watch while you listen
You can customize the Sonic animations with different colors. You can make the animation look vivid and colorful for dance music, or perhaps a bit more monochromatic for a post-rock playlist – it’s your call, as you can make it match the vibe of the music you’re listening to.
To activate the Theme, you simply need to connect to Spotify from the Music Player in the sidebar and start playing something. You’ll then see how the animation turns into finer particles that react to the music you’re listening to, resembling the effect that sound waves have on a thin layer of sand.
Now, listening to music in your Opera browser is a whole audiovisual experience! It doesn’t matter whether you’re listening to Norwegian black metal, some Caribbean reggaeton beats…or whatever in the world this track is.
The Sonic Theme is integrated to the browser in the same way as the Music Player is, so when you start a call or watch a video, both the music and the animation pause. This ensures that you’re not using additional system resources in the background when you’re busy going about your day.
The Sonic Theme explained
If you’re an Opera user you might know what we’re about with Themes, but you’ve certainly not seen a theme so innovative from the technical perspective before. As you might know, Dynamic Themes use shaders that employ the WebGPU standard to create an animation that runs in the background of your browser without impacting the system’s resource consumption significantly.
With the Sonic Theme, the browser captures audio from the sidebar and converts it into a power spectrum texture, where one axis represents frequency and the other represents time. This texture is passed to the shader, where each pixel samples the current audio intensity using its screen position and animation-driven coordinates.The shader applies a frequency compensation curve to balance the spectrum and outputs an amplitude value that drives animation, color, and other visual effects in sync with the music. So if that all sounds complicated, just remember that whatever you’re seeing on the screen is completely unique to what you’re listening to.
See your favorite music dance while you browse – download Opera today.
*Opera users in selected countries will be offered an opportunity to upgrade to Spotify Premium if they are not subscribers already. Users in Argentina, Brazil, Italy, Poland, and Spain will be offered Spotify Premium for 3 months. Users in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States will also be offered 3 months free, while users who previously paid for Spotify Premium in those countries – but canceled it more than 30 days ago – will be offered 2 months free. Users in India will be offered 2 months free. Users in Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam will be offered the opportunity to pay for 1 month of Spotify Premium to get 3 months free. Users in Turkey will be offered 3 months of Spotify Premium for 99 TRY. This offer is available in the Music Player of the Opera One R2 sidebar.
This content originally appeared on Opera News and was authored by Patrick Curtin
Patrick Curtin | Sciencx (2025-11-14T08:30:00+00:00) Your browser now grooves to your tunes with Opera and Spotify’s new music theme. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2025/11/14/your-browser-now-grooves-to-your-tunes-with-opera-and-spotifys-new-music-theme/
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