Post Archive
› November 12, 2004
More browser news
Mozilla is not the only browser developer that can produce high quality, high tech products - Opera is on the march too. Today they released the third preview of Opera 7.60 on the Windows platform, a browser that is (user-interface-wise) very like the current Opera 7.54, but has many improvements under the hood. Notable changes from 7.5x versions are new versions of the linear_b ECMAScript engine and the Presto rendering engine, support for CSS3 Speech module, XHTML+Voice1.2, XMLHttpRequest, XMLSerializer, DOMParser, DOM3 Load & Save, experimental TLS support, and wmode support for plugins. This means it fixes, among other things, GMail support and handles plugins with transparent backgrounds.
Actually, the updated capabilities makes this feel like a bigger update than the 7.54 to 7.60 jump might indicate. Take it for a spin and see how you like it.
Comments
1. November 12, 2004 02:54 PM
2. November 12, 2004 03:52 PM
noah Posted…
"I'm not sure why the web-design community is so aligned to encouraging people to use Firefox."
Well, probably because Firefox is free. It's much easier to covert people away from free with free... and not with free-with-annoying-banners-until-you-pay. Not that we want to drive out Opera, but let's face it, it's not a popular choice given the market and the goal: to ween users off Internet Explorer.
3. November 12, 2004 04:46 PM
Paul D Posted…
I used to recommend Opera to everyone before Firefox came along, but as Noah said, when you're getting people to stop using IE for the first time, Firefox is free, and ad-free Opera isn't. For older systems, I still recommend Opera - it's just so fast.
For my own part, I'd buy Opera for Mac OS X in a minute if they added advanced ad-blocking features. In the meantime, I'm happy with Camino.
4. November 13, 2004 02:05 AM
John Posted…
I'm glad I purchased Opera years ago and can only say that this Beta version is the slickest bit of work I've ever seen from them.
I use Firefox on a daily basis however it is as much for the extensions as it is for the browser itself.
Well done Opera and more power to you.
5. November 13, 2004 04:06 AM
Roger Johansson Posted…
No Mac version? All I could find was version 7.54. That voice thing is looking interesting, but it's Windows-only, right?
6. November 13, 2004 09:27 AM
Luke Redpath Posted…
Sorry to be pedantic, but this one really bugs me for some reason and I see it a lot...it's spelt "speech", not "speach".
7. November 13, 2004 06:53 PM
Amit Karmakar Posted…
Waiting for the mac version!! Others are catching up an its good to know that. Well given another couple of month there is every possibility we'd have a log more in the market to choose from. Again, Ihave yet to see a browser like Omniweb that respect colour sync, compact/reformat of code and a few other handy features the other have never had till date.
8. November 13, 2004 08:15 PM
liorean Posted…
Praises of this preview of Opera 7.60 from Mozilla direction... Cheah Chu Yeow on Forever Geek and Asa Dotzler on adot's notblog*. Apparently, there was more UI changes that I percieved - maybe since I'm a tester and install new versions every week if not more often, I lose the bigger perspective.
Oh, and Luke: I had seen that yesterday but was too tired to fix it at the moment. Fixed now.
9. November 30, 2004 08:34 PM
Hein Tore Posted…
The third preview version of the Opera browser is great! Simpler and more customizable than ever, and it's stuffed with great features.
I'll never use FireFox or IE again. Never!
moonshake Posted…
Good that you noted this. Firefox seems to be getting all the buzz. I'm not sure why the web-design community is so aligned to encouraging people to use Firefox. Souldn't the community be encouraging users to choose a preferred user agent from the multitude of choices now available, rather than asking people to use Firefox specifically?
IMHO, Opera is also a great alternative to IE and is constantly getting better (and more standards compliant) with every release.