Opera Browser Wiki : Opera75BETA

Opera V7.5 BETA - Faster & Better

Opera V7.5 BETA has gone public, after a few months of private previews (see below). The general changelog can be found here. For those who have not been following the preview releases, the major features are:

• User interface redesigned - new toolbar and panel management.
• Chat client - tiny but functional, and perfectly integrated. List of customizations
• RSS newsfeeds - view RSS feeds tthrough the mail interface.
• Fast full-text indexing of e-mail messages - mail has been turbo-charged, and a bayesian-like filter system added.
• If you want JUST a browser - a simple checkbox unloads Mail/RSS/Chat from the application!
• System tray icon/e-mail notifier - with a customisable context menu!
• Spell check support - using the excellent ASpell.

A new skin is in the works (currently unfinished) that is much less controversial than the last default skin. The beta release was also simultaneous for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux, FreeBSD AND Solaris.

More news will appear here as it comes in.

Old Preview release info:

Preview 4 is out. The changelog is here. Highlights are:

• M2 has been tuned up to be much more memory efficient.
• The start panel has been morphed into a search panel.
• Several dialogs have been converted into pages (rather than panels in previous previews).
• Start up and exit are now much faster.
• The RSS reader finally respects cache directives.
• An INI merge system has been introduced (great news, although currently very buggy).
• lots of little chat additions.
• Lots of little bug fixes.

If you do lots of INI tweaking, this may not be an ideal release for you. Best solution is to manually edit INI files for now.

---

Preview 3 of V7.5 has been released. Get it from here. As always, Tim's excellent changelog has all the details. Highlights are:

• File transfers now have been enabled for chat.
• Opera now has a system tray icon. This allows control of the main window (a bit buggy) and will change state when new mail has arrived.
• You can now change custom Panel icons.
• Old dialogs are back - with maximised panels still available.
• Lots of nice little touches.

---

Preview 2 of V7.5 has been released. Please get it from here and see Tim's excellent changelog.

• Chat has been upgraded (colour support works now)
• Favicons have finally been added to bookmarks!
• The panel UI has been revamped (with seperate toolbar setups depending on maximised state).
• Transfer manager improved.
• M2 engine has been stabilised. Faster and memory leaks fixed, duplicates nearly completely fixed.
• RSS feeds will be automatically added when clicking on them.

Points related to the first Preview:

The new preview release (a preview is closer to alpha than beta status) of V7.5 is packed to the brim with new features. There have been some minor display issues fixed, but the UI and new features has recieved the brunt of the work (beware some hyopthesising below!):

1. A built-in Chat client (based on the IRC protocol). Apparantly this has been possible since V7 came out, but hadn't been set up. They have done a brilliant job, and the client, although simple, is really nice to use. This is not an IRC client per se - it is built-in chat which happens to use the IRC protocol for the behind-the-scenes work. IRC will probably be one of several posssible back-end mechanisms that may/will be used. Jabber is planned too. --SeaKai
2. an RSS reader built-in!!! I've been waiting ages for something like this. It works brilliantly for my feeds, but needs a bit of work to the UI, as currently they are treated as 'emails'. but a simple toggle to turn off the mail window toolbars is all that is needed...
3. Totally revamped toolbar management system. Instead of having toolbar management spread over many sub-menu's and a confusing dialog - it is all in one place (as we'd been arguing for). The selected toolbar is highlighted so you can see what you are modifying, and you have MANY options for every toolbar, even the panel selectors can now have a position specified.
4. The cookie manager can now edit the cookie contents, it has a bug on displaying the date but it will be a great addition to cookie management.
5. The default menu structure has been rebuilt, using the IE/ Firebird / Munin model. This cuts down on the number of confusing options for beginners and mirrors more closely other browsers they may have used before.
6. The hotlist is DEAD! - long live the hotlist! - They have dropped the name 'hotlist', but the functionality is roughly the same with additional options added. Most significantly, you can finally control the display of user-specified panels using SSR, and zoom and reload them at will. The panel selector can now be placed to the left/right and thus used as a quick-toggle to show/hide the panel (but placing it on top

Categories:

CategoryOpera

Comments [Hide comments/form]

Add a comment to this page (use wiki formatting if needed, no HTML/BBCode please). Only registered users can submit links, your comment will be deleted otherwise: