Despite Opera’s diminishing presence in the market, there’s nothing stopping Opera from being the first to “eat the crab” in the industry. Recently they announced that they will bring emoji-only URL support to the browser’s address bar, giving a new twist to what is currently a slightly bland address bar.
This new feature is a collaboration between Opera and Yat, a startup that sells emoji URLs, and through Yat users can make a one-time purchase and receive a unique domain name made up of emojis.
To be clear, these emoji links are currently supported in all browsers, but users need to manually enter the y.at/ prefix before the emoji, whereas in Opera they can be omitted and simply entered followed by the emoji.
In a statement, Jorgen Arnesen, executive vice president of Opera’s mobile business, said.
This collaboration marks a major shift in the way the Internet works. It’s been nearly 30 years since the World Wide Web was launched, but there hasn’t been much innovation in the area of Web links. By integrating with Yat, Opera users will be able to ditch characters like “www”, “.com” and even words in their links and navigate to sites using only emojis. It’s a new, more interesting and easier way to navigate.
Emojis have become part of everyday communication, they are more intuitive and express the emotions behind them better than words, but they are still used more in instant messaging and social media, and in the most commonly used URLs, they are still in the “text + number + symbol” combination. users use emojis to express themselves.
Naveen Jain, co-founder of Yat, said emoji domains allow users to personalize their Internet identities, potentially giving creators, artists and others more visibility online. A new version of Opera that supports emoji-only addresses is now available for download.