Opera is joyfully celebrating the 40th birthday of Jon Von Tetzchner, their founder and CEO. The Register recently interviewed him where he chatted about Opera’s success…particularly in the mobile browser market. As it stands right now Opera has some big releases shipping within the next week!
For starters Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 will be coming out tomorrow with better Blackberry support and some new features. I’m crossing my fingers that it will fix the rendering of our site, which right now has problems with our upper navigation bar. It renders fine in every other browser (including Safari on the iPhone) so hopefully it will fix itself.
Even bigger news is that the Desktop Team announced the release date of Opera 9.5 Alpha to be next Tuesday. It is supposed to have some cool new features as well as a ton of bug fixes, but more importantly we’ll finally see what resides in the Status Bar:
Here’s a list of what we know Opera 9.5 will have:
- Improved CSS3 support (including text-shadow)
- Superior SVG support
- New javascript engine with support for ECMAScript 4 ’getters’ and ’setters’.
- Several usability improvements that make the popular features easier to access, and more consistent with other browsers. The changes made are based on the feedback received from the users.
- Screen reader support, which is typically used by the visually impaired to have websites read back to them.
- Improved keyboard navigation and more consistent keyboard shortcuts
- Mac users will get a new visual look and feel
- Many speed improvements which result in faster page loading and a more responsive interface.
I can’t wait to see what Tuesday brings! Mark your calendar.
Source: Opera Watch and Opera Desktop Team
Update: The Opera 9.5 download is now available. We have put together an exclusive review detailing the new features, along with a video demonstration.
Ryan, I just checked this site with the new beta, unfortunately the it still renders the horizontal menu bar incorrectly. I just submitted a bug report with the Opera Mini team; hopefully it will get fixed in one of the next updates.
As someone who just started experimenting with Opera, I’m excited to give 9.5 a try!
Thanks Daniel! If that renders correctly then I’ll be extremely happy. It’s so close to being perfect!
Ryan, I would love to make you happy.
I’ll follow up with the Opera Mini team.
I was looking for Opera forums and I saw a message on my.opera.com saying “All messages deleted.” Apparently Opera has a webmail service. I decided to check it out and it looks like it was outdated 20 years ago. The interface is horribly clunky, there isn’t even any rich text composing. On top of that, the free version has, get this, 3MB of storage space! Or, you can pay $30/yr to get 25MB of storage space. At first, I thought that sucks for people who lost all their messages; but after seeing those quotas, that couldn’t be more than a dozen graphics-enabled messages. Is this service a joke? Have the people that use it ever heard of Yahoo!, WinLive, Gmail, heck even AOL crushes this thing.
[my.opera.com]
operamail.com
Speaking of Y!, I’m hoping Kestrel improves Opera’s compatibility w/ Y!Mail.
I just thought of a feature I’d like in Opera. I’d like to be able to re-order search engines, and dividers. Currently they can only be added or removed.