If you have to work in an office and are constantly afraid of your boss’s evil eye hiding in the back of your cubicle, you may be aware of the “boss button.” It’s a special button or shortcut that can instantly hide whatever you’ve done and replace it with a spreadsheet of, say, a TPS report. This idea has been around for a surprisingly long time, but Opera is bringing it to a new generation of lazy gamers with its Opera GX browser.
The latest version of Opera GX sets your F12 key into “panic mode,” which instantly opens a new tab to one of a handful of harmless sites. The idea, naturally, is to hide whatever you’re actually doing. Opera says in a survey of 2,200 users in the US and UK, 36 percent admitted to accessing “inappropriate content” at school or work. A third and slightly more agreed mostly to social media… but more than half (58 percent) said they check out adult content. More than a fifth were threatened with “suspension or dismissal,” which makes sense.
To check it out, you need to enable the Early Bird preview mode. After doing this I wasn’t sold. First, I’m not a fan of Opera GX anyway — the “gamer” visual theme is off-putting, and I don’t understand why a gaming-specific browser would need things like a cryptocurrency wallet and ChatGPT integration. Secondly, the default sites that randomly open when you enable Panic Mode are quite generic, like Wikipedia or Reddit. A few of these alone can get you into trouble in an office environment, like YouTube, Twitch, and Steam. If you actually plan to use this feature, be sure to set it via “opera://settings/panic_button_settings” to go to something more obviously business-related.