Solo Technology

More on Opera 9 beta 2 (last post). Simplerich has shared his take on it recently (in short, doesn’t like it). What’s interesting is that one of the things that drives him nuts is my favorite feature of Opera! I like going back to the most recently used tab when closing another tab. He hates it. His other point is that the tabs are up above the opera bar. At first that kinda bugged me, but I don’t even notice it now. And the more I ponder that the more I like having the tabs closer to the top of the window. In fact, I’d like to move them higher to be above my “personal bar.” But, opera doesn’t seem overly flexible in letting the user drag around toolbars (at least, not that I’ve noticed so far).

Have I mentioned how fast this browser feels?

Peter asked for screenshots. I don’t have much that’s all that fancy to offer really. With this latest beta, the widgets aren’t quite so in your face… so it pretty much looks like good ol’ Opera. (and can I confess, that while I use a few widgets in an “on demand” fashion, I really haven’t found many that are all that compelling.) However, here are a couple pictures. Click the little thumbnail to the left for the full-size one. This lower one is showing an example of what you see when hovering over a tab. Kinda nifty and no extension hunting necessary.

What’s somewhat interesting to me is that with this latest beta, Opera quickly became my default browser on the home machine. I have it set to load the same set of tabs on startup and just love the speed. Yet on my work machines I just can’t quite seem to want to make the switch. No clue why… apparently I’m no vulcan as somehow it just “feels wrong”. Lol, weird, huh? So the work boxen still have Firefox as the default browser with Opera installed just in case I figure out why I’m not switched over. Fortunately, the FF and Opera keyboard shortcuts that I use are the same for both. Otherwise I’d be a mess.

The WordPress wysiwyg editor doesn’t quite work properly with Opera. Close, but the link dialog gets a big goofy… Frankly, not a big loss as I tend to leave that switched off and use the “old” post editor. Other than that, I really haven’t found any other compatibility issues on sites I work on or visit frequently.

Just to keep this post from growing any longer, I’ll just stop now and say I dig it. Have you tried the latest beta yet? Share your opinion if you have!

Leave a Reply