Of all the dynamic themes that can customize the Opera browser’s home screen, the Sonic theme that feeds off your Spotify streaming has to be the coolest. You cue up your Spotify music, play your song, and receive a pulsating, gesticulating rhythm of what looks like colored light and sand dancing across your page.

night at the opera

Never heard of Opera?

Opera can’t match the dominance of Google’s Chrome, the first-party bundling of Apple’s Safari, or the name recognition of the plucky, independent Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox, but it’s found popularity with people who want less of a corporate browser that snoops on your data and more of a privacy-forward alternative.

Its built-in VPN and ad blocker make it an attractive choice, and it’s built on Chromium, the same architecture that underpins Chrome, Brave, and a host of other browsers.

Opera lets you customize your home page with themes, and the Sonic theme reacts anytime you begin listening to Spotify on your device. The specific music you’re listening to influences the patterns that develop on the screen, so that if you switch tracks, the patterns will change, too.

“All of Opera’s Dynamic Themes use shaders that employ the WebGPU standard to create an animation that runs in the background of the browser without impacting the system’s resource consumption significantly,” according to Opera.

Shaders are computer operations that apply to data that’s moving through a pipeline. Imagine a tunnel with data flowing through it in one direction constantly. The shader is like a paint nozzle at the end of the tunnel that sprays onto the data as it passes.

Opera elaborates by explaining that “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.”

I know. It’s a lot of deep talk. Luckily, you don’t have to know the nitty-gritty to enjoy the fancy colors and sights as they dance across your screen with your chosen beat thumping along in synchronization.