TIP: Disable or Remove Tab Emojis Feature in Opera Browser (UPDATED)

Opera is one of the most customizable and feature rich web browsers available on Internet and the Opera team keeps adding new features to the web browser. Recently the Opera developer team added a new “Tab Emoji” feature to Opera web browser that allows the users to decorate their tabs using emoticons/smiley but many users aren’t liking it.

On June 04, 2024, Opera team released Opera 110.0.5130.64 version which came with updated Chromium version, security updates, bug fixes and a brand new feature called “Tab Emojis”.

Tab emoji feature has been implemented for users who like to decorate or customize the UI. It allows users to assign custom emoji to any tab to decorate it and to make it different from other tabs.

Opera Adds Tab Emojis Feature to the Web Browser

After upgrading to the latest version of Opera web browser, when the user hovers the mouse cursor over a tab, a new emoji or emoticon section is displayed on the tab hover preview card just above the website title and URL information.

Following screenshot shows the tab emoji option appearing on the tab hover card in Opera 110 or later versions:

The user can click on a desired emoji and it’ll be immediately added or pinned to the selected tab. If the user doesn’t like the default emojis present on the list, he can click on the “Add (+)” icon present on the tab emoji section and Opera will launch the built-in emoji picker drawer or flyout to select other emoji.

If the selected emoji doesn’t look good, the user can again hover over the tab to access the tab hover preview card and click on the added/selected emoji to remove it from the tab.

Opera Users Find the New Tab Emoji Feature Annoying and Useless

Tab emoji feature might look interesting or useful for a few users but most of the Opera users are not happy about it. They find the new tab emoji feature unnecessary, annoying and slow that makes the Opera web browser bloatware.

Initially when the tab emoji feature was introduced in Opera 110.0.5130.64 version, it came with a highly annoying bug which started irritating the users. If a user added an emoji to a tab and later he tried to close the tab by clicking on the “Close (x)” button, it was blocked by the selected tab emoji and the user was unable to close the tab. After some hours, Opera team fixed the bug by releasing a minor update 110.0.5130.66 for the web browser.

Many Opera users are annoyed by this new feature and are complaining about it. Many people just want a faster and stable browser to surf the Internet. They don’t want to use any extra option to decorate the tabs. Addition of the new tab emoji feature will also consume CPU resources and RAM and might slow down the web browser.

METHOD 1: Show or Hide Tab Emojis Using Opera Settings

Now Opera users are looking for ways to get rid of the new tab emoji feature and fortunately Opera team has added a built-in option on Settings page to turn on/off the new tab emoji feature quickly and easily.

Opera Settings page now contains a new option to directly show or hide tab emoji feature. If you don’t like the new tab emoji feature, you can easily deactivate and disable it in Opera web browser using following simple steps:

STEP 1. Launch Opera web browser, click on Opera Menu button and then click on Settings option. Alternatively you can directly launch Settings page by pressing Alt+P keys together.

STEP 2. Now click on “Browser” tab or section present in left-sidebar.

STEP 3. In right-side pane, scroll down a little and you’ll see “User Interface” section.

STEP 4. To disable tab emoji feature, set the toggle button given next to “Show emojis in tab tooltip” option to OFF.

It’ll immediately remove the tab emoji feature from your web browser.

In future, if you decide to restore tab emoji feature, set the above mentioned toggle option to ON again.

METHOD 2: Disable Tab Emojis Feature in Opera Using Hidden Secret Flag

I also noticed that Opera team mentioned #tab-art preference/flag on the official Opera 110 changelog page but I couldn’t find the mentioned flag on Opera://flags page.

UPDATE: The hidden secret preference/flag #tab-art mentioned above has been added to the latest Opera 111 stable version.

If you are using the latest version of Opera browser, you can follow the steps given below to disable or remove tab emojis feature in your browser:

STEP 1: Launch Opera web browser and type opera://flags in address bar and press Enter. It’ll open the hidden secret advanced configuration page called “Experiments“.

STEP 2: Now click inside “Search flags” text box and type emoji. It’ll show following option in the result:

STEP 3: To disable the new tab emojis feature completely in your Opera web browser, select “Disabled” from the drop-down box.

STEP 4: Opera will ask you to restart the browser. Click on “Relaunch now” button to restart Opera.

That’s it. After restarting the browser, you’ll no longer get the new tab emojis feature in your web browser.

PS: In future, if you decide to restore the tab emojis feature in Opera, set the above mentioned flag value to Default again.

METHOD 3: Disable or Remove Tab Emojis Feature Using Custom Opera Shortcut

An Opera user burn426 at official Opera forum has shared a working solution to disable or remove the new tab emojis feature permanently in Opera web browser. Users can create a customized shortcut containing a command-line parameter to launch Opera web browser without the annoying tab emojis feature.

Following steps will help you in modifying Opera shortcut to launch it without tab emojis feature:

STEP 1: Right-click on Opera shortcut present on Desktop and select Properties option. If Opera shortcut is pinned to Taskbar, right-click on it and again right-click on Opera option present on the jumplist and select Properties option.

If you launch Opera from Start Menu, copy and paste following string in RUN dialog box and press Enter key:

It’ll open Programs folder in File Explorer which contains Opera browser shortcut. Right-click on it and select Properties option.

STEP 2: Once you open Opera properties box, append following string at the end of the text string present in Target field:

--with-feature:tab-art=off

Remember there must be a blank space between existing text string and the appended string.

STEP 3: Apply the changes and launch Opera using the shortcut. The tab emojis feature will no longer appear when you hover mouse cursor over a tab.

Thanks again to burnout426 for sharing the workaround.

PS: In future, if you decide to restore the tab emojis feature in Opera browser, delete the above mentioned custom parameter from Opera shortcut.

BONUS TIP: If you don’t want to create or modify shortcut to always launch Opera browser with tab emojis feature disabled, you can use following command in RUN dialog box (WIN+R):

It’ll launch Opera browser without tab emojis feature whenever you execute this command.

Some Research and Findings on Tab Emojis Feature in Opera Web Browser

After doing some research, I discovered that the emoji picker is launched by Opera browser using the chrome://emoji-picker URL. You can manually open this URL using the address bar in your Opera browser and it’ll open the emoji picker directly in a new tab. So somehow if we can block or disable the emoji picker URL in Opera, it might also disable the tab emoji feature.

Anyway at the moment, it seems impossible to get rid of the new tab emoji feature in Opera browser but I’m highly confident that Opera team will add a dedicated option on Opera Settings page or a secret preference/flag on Opera flags page to turn on/off the new tab emoji feature in upcoming versions of Opera web browser.

If I find any working method to disable or remove tab emoji feature in Opera web browser, I’ll update this article. So stay tuned.

In the meantime, if you want to stay away from tab emoji feature, you can block the automatic update feature in your Opera web browser and restrict it from automatically updating to the new version until Opera team adds some ways to disable or remove the tab emoji feature in future versions of the web browser.

Following article will help you in disabling or blocking auto update feature in Opera web browser so that you can continue using older version of the web browser in your device:

[Tip] How to Disable or Block Auto-Update Feature (Opera_AutoUpdate.exe) in Opera

Also Check:

[Tip] How to Restore Classic Tab Cycler in Opera Web Browser

[Tip] Disable or Remove Opera Splash Screen or Startup Logo and Sound