Opera 7.50 released

[CougTek]

Download it here.

Press release.

• [daily dose of PR mooseshit]
  

  Still, with all the features, Opera remains the fastest, best coded, small browsing application in the world, weighing in at 3.5 MB.

  [/daily dose of PR mooseshit]

Anyone told them that there are other browsers out there except IE and them?

Not that I care ; I prefer Firefox.

 

[time]

I've gone right off Firefox. Too many broken or missing bits for my comfort.

Has anyone else noticed how much faster Mozilla 1.7 is compared to 1.6? Or is it just me? This is the first browser that feels as fast as Opera overall, IMO.

As for Opera 7.50 ... I've been trying the build from a couple of weeks ago and am seriously unimpressed. I'd be interested to see what other people think.

 

[Mercutio]

The only problem I *ever* have had with Firefox has been a screen redraw bug that only happens when I have hundreds (er, dozens, on crappy computers) of tabs open. That's it.

But all the cool stuff more than makes up for it. My newest favorite extension is "Open in HTTrack".

One thing I will say, though, is that there are apparently now a couple of parasites that come in a lovely .XPI installer packages, just like the very handy extensions that come from mozdev and the like. I saw that on Slashdot today. That may mean that we who use "the good browser" might actually have to deal with spyware crap someday on our own PCs.

 

[time]

Still, with all the features, Opera remains the fastest, best coded, small browsing application in the world, weighing in at 3.5 MB.

Well, considering the integrated mail client and functionality, it's certainly heaps smaller than Firefox and 30% the size of Mozilla. To my mind, that does support their contention that it's better coded. I think the faster bit is starting to look a bit ragged. I haven't checked against Moz 1.7 - which I have just said seems significantly improved - but Opera is fastest rendering very large graphics files (N/A to the internet) and when stepping back through pages. I'd have to fire up my old P450 to see if there is a difference elsewhere, but I hardly think it's worth the effort.

 

[time]

The bugs I hate most are to do with remembering passwords. For example, if after submitting a remembered password the page can't be loaded (at least I think it's something like that), it forgets the password.

I'm also grumpy about its dropdown address list. Again, if the page you select can't be loaded, it wipes it from the list!

It seems to me that for something that can be recommended as a drop-in replacement for IE & OE, Firefox and Thunderbird are being eclipsed by Mozilla. Although Merc points out that Firefox's extensibility is a really big feature for people like him.

 

[Mercutio]

Hm. I don't ever tell browsers to remember passwords. I can't say I've noticed any problems in that regard.

But the extensions, time, are godly things. "Adblock" - the ability to selectively, permanently strip page elements from page load - is manna from heaven, and the highlight-and-open-in-tabs goodness of Linky is something any experience web user should love.

re: the Future of Moz-based browsers, the last I've heard is that Mozilla is being given a new lease on life, rather than being fazed out as was announced about a year ago. Honestly, I prefer the linkage between my email and web browser that Moz gives, but a lot of my favorite extensions are FireFox-only, so I'm sticking with that for now.