The start page has always been the first thing you see when you open Opera – right after you install it, and every single time you come back. For us, that makes it one of the most important moments in your entire browsing experience. 

Our browsers have always been about customization. Many of you love that. But we also understand that some of you just want to get on with it. You aren’t there to curate a homepage. You’re just there to search for something and find it. In that sense, a lot of those customization options aren’t a feature – they were just noise that you had to get past. 

We realised that and so, we made a call. But we had to ask ourselves: what does a start page look like for someone who just wants to get going?

The new Opera for Android start page is cleaner, calmer, and designed to get out of your way. Search sits front and center because at the end of the day, that’s still job one. The layout allows you to breathe. There is a whole new set of wallpapers that were designed to give a warmer and more considered feel. Similarly, the Speed Dials have been softened and rounded, which sounds minor, until you notice how much more settled the whole page feels.

The dedicated football hub 

Opera has always packed more into the browser than you’d expect. Building a rich feature set around what our users actually care about is something we take seriously. So when the biggest football tournament was on the horizon, we built something worthy of it. What used to be a score check in a browser tab is now a full matchday experience.

Open Opera for Android and the Live Scores carousel is either right on your start page or available in the menu. Every ongoing match, live, without navigating anywhere. Tap into a match and you get the full picture — starting line-ups, match events as they happen, and head-to-head statistics for context. Not just the score, but enough to follow a game you aren’t able to watch live.

The notifications are built around the moments that actually matter. Select your favourite teams and Opera sends you alerts for kick-off, goals, red cards, and full-time. The specific updates that change how a match is unfolding allow you to feel the energy of the match. Opera Mini is also adding on-the-whistle match reports for the biggest 104 matches this summer, available from this Friday. As soon as a match ends, you have the full story waiting for you. 

The news feed is powered by AI and adjusts to what you read over time. Player pages are also available on Opera for Android and Opera Mini, which means you can look up your favorite players and see their stats and recent news. A tournament this big means everyone has an opinion on the squad, so being able to pull up the actual numbers in seconds is the kind of thing that ends arguments.

The whole point is that the information a fan needs during a tournament should be in one place. Not assembled across four apps, not requiring a dedicated download. Just there, in the browser you already have open.

What 77,000 fans actually think

We recently asked 77,000 of you to name the most iconic final on the biggest stage in football. 2022’s Argentina vs France won at 31%, which is nearly three times the next answer – the Zidane headbutt final in 2006, still impossible to forget twenty years on.

We also asked how you follow the tournament when you can’t watch live and your answers gave us a lot of confidence in the football hub we’d already been building for you. 

87% of you admitted you will stay up past midnight to watch matches this summer. Almost half said you will stay up for every single match you can catch. Considering the inconvenient timings, that’s a lot of very tired people across Europe, Africa, and Asia over the next few weeks. When you’re not able to watch live, almost 50% reach for live scores rather than highlights or social media. It’s understandable – you want to know what’s happening as it happens. The case for a football hub inside your mobile browser wasn’t hard to make.

France leads the winner predictions at 21%, with Brazil following at 16% and Spain at 13%. The defending champions Argentina are fourth with 11%. We also asked for your opinions about who you think the unexpected strong team is – Brazil, Japan, Morocco, and Norway got honorable mentions in the dark horse list. 

Surprisingly, respondents said that football was about more than just winning: they said that being entertained was more important. That tracks with the way people seem to be following this tournament – not just the scoreline, but the whole thing. That is exactly what our dedicated football hub is built for. Live Scores on Opera keeps you in the match in real time, so you feel every moment as it unfolds.

Download Opera for Android or Opera Mini and follow every match without leaving your browser.

Survey conducted among 77,603 Opera users across 190+ countries on SurveyMonkey, 13–24 May 2026.

footballLive ScoresOpera for Androidopera mini

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