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Opera V7.6-V8.0 Previews and Betas

Opera 8 final is out: FTP Download — HTTP download — Official changelog. This page is kept for the historical record.

Opera 8 beta 3 is out

FYI, this release does NOT have the new IMAP back-end. If you have used Opera 8.0 Preview 5 with IMAP accounts, do not install this release over that installation. It'll mess up your mail accounts. Do a clean install instead.

So says Junyor on the forums

FTP Download — Official changelog

• User javascript!!! The end of abominable practices of torturing CSS with javascript. Read more about it on UserJS.
• New preferences dialog. A few features are missing (network settings and cache tweaks, some personal info), and the dialog is still "rough round the edges" as acknowledged by OS. Especially welcome is new control for tooltips! You can use the old dialog alongside the new, and set all settings to your heart's content, as long as you alter your menu.ini. See instructions Or add this button: Old Prefs
• Lost Preference Settings INI Guide
• SVG V1.1 Tiny support built-in! See here, here or here. This is a native implementation, and the opera.dll has not grown by much at all - suggesting SVG engine has been in for some time...
• Pop-up windows with hidden address bars show the domain / security certificate information to make spoofing much harder. Clicking the info pulls up the full address bar with the link to security info.
• Better attachments handling for Mail, including saving multiple attachments.
• High quality voice libraries, and it seems Opera's voice control commands are working much better.
• Quite a few rendering fixes for CSS bugs it seems. Some new ones introduced!
• XML:id support. has been removed from changelog as it appears broken (source)
• Font substitution fixed. See generated content substituted entities
• Easter egg — for now

Opera V8.0 Preview 5.1 has arrived

See forum announcement — changelog — IMAP Known bug list

• chat fixes
• M2 various bug fixes
• Experimental IMAP module (V5.1 preview fixes a couple major IMAP bugs present in preview 5)

Please note that this release is not to be considered stable and that it contains experimental IMAP code. It should only be used on properly backed up computers and, for IMAP users, with e-mail accounts set up specifically for testing.

You should expect to experience data loss and other situations that could lead to the loss of valuable information. Furthermore, you cannot install this build over a previous installation and revert back or install a build with the old IMAP back-end over this build. This can cause serious corruption in the local storage and indexing of messages.

We’re releasing this now because we’ve reached the point in development where we need to test in a wider range of environments. There are still many issues we need to solve, but it’s important to know if there are any design flaws. We have not yet decided if the new IMAP back-end will be included in Opera 8.0. Your feedback is essential in the decision-making process. We’ll be maintaining a list of severe known issues, to prevent duplicate bug reports.

Opera V8.0beta2 has arrived

Currently only available for windows:

FTP download — HTTP download — Changelog — Security Advisory

Some first impressions:

• Fix for IDN spoofing, by introducing a whitelist for safe top-level domains (curently :no:jp:de:se:kr:tw:cn:at:dk:ch:li:). Sites not in the whitelist will show the encoded domain in the URL field. The list is updated automatically when Opera checks for a new version.
• Security Information dialog greatly expanded. And security icon now has a coloured background for emphasis, and the name of the certificate owner clearly shown. This area can be customized within skin.ini

• Added support for document.selection and document.getSelection in form input fields. Added support for TextRange with methods collapse, move, moveStart, and moveEnd, required by Google Suggest. This means a lot of forum and blog basic text area editors should now work, though more advanced TextAreaEditor’s won’t.
• Transfers have option to open in background finally!
• Atom feeds supported!
• Fieldsets can be now freely floated and positioned
• There is an active bookmark folder menu added in menu.ini, but no button in toolbar, and menu doesn’t work yet: Button
• Apparently CTRL+T will remember the folder location after adding the first bookmark in a session. CTRL+ALT+T still works as before.
• There is a new [SVG Popup Menu] in menu.ini.
• Small changes to Chat server setting (allow incoming connections)
• An option to use proxies for local servers.
• TLS 1.1 is back in prefs
• Spellcheck for Mac is coming?
• Automatic site-specific UA spoofing, which is updated every time Opera checks for a new version. Stored in ua.ini in profile.
• Back button apparently has a new hidden pop-up menu, though I don’t know how one triggers it. — hold down the mouse button for a second or longer, or drag down to open up the back/forward history; neat! (see also Rijk’s post).

First regression: unicode font substitution is broken!

Opera V8.0beta1

The V7.6 previews have just morphed into V8.0beta. The good news for registered users of V7.0 is this:

Opera 8.0 has a new core, which has had a major overhaul, and the underlying technology is in fact vastly improved. In addition, the user interface has changed a lot too. (…) In the case of Opera 8.0, there are also many changes under the hood, and they are not immediately obvious to most people. Does that mean that these major changes are simply irrelevant? Certainly not. And it does render the “marketing gimmick” argument moot. The biggest reason for moving to 8.0 is actually based on technical changes, both to the core and to the user interface. Calling this Opera 7.6 would simply be misleading from a technical perspective.

Add to this that the upgrade from Opera 7 to Opera 8 is actually completely free, and I think you will see that this was not a move to squeeze more money out of our customers. In fact, we’ve just given all Opera 7 customers a free upgrade, and added to this, we’ve changed our license terms so that there is only one license for all desktop platforms, which means that you can install Opera on any number of computers in your own home, regardless of the (desktop) operating system used. Yes, that’s right. You can install the registered version of Opera as many times as you like with just a single license.

Håvard K. Moen, Opera Software

Changelog

You can see the changelog and links to download here:

http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/operabeta.html

Older Previews [7.6]

Technical Preview 4 is just out:

Windows Forum Post — Windows Changelog | Linux Forum Post — Linux Changelog

There are some nice changes, the highlights being:

• User Interface:
  1. Mail and Newsfeeds can now have their own toolbars (finally!)
  2. Multiple RSS feeds on a page now allow a requestor to drop down from the URL field.
  3. Delete private data dialog simplified - not sure about it, but I suppose for novices…
  4. Adding bookmarks can now be specified for Root (usual key), or for the active bookmark folder using CTRL+SHIFT+T
  5. Favicons are appearing in other parts of the UI such as Top-10 list, search fields, history etc. Favicons are now deleted when Delete private data is activated - to stop a favicon being deleted, you need to make it read-only in your profile/images directory.
  6. Opera’s pop-up messages for e.g. downloads have been improved (now skinned).
• Other Stuff:
  1. After being played with in V7.2x betas, version update checking has finally arrived! Note it has not been finalised and so currently generates errors…
• Security:
  1. Frame handling tightned up and a potential Java vulnerability closed.

Note: Junyor has detailed an undocumented new INI setting for changing the default rendering mode of Opera [User Prefs] Rendering Mode=n - see here for more ?€” (Tarquin has a nice turorial here on rendering modes)

——

It is Preview 3 time.

Windows Changelog - Windows forum post
Preview 3 of Linux not yet released.

This preview has less radical changes than of preview 2, but it does bring back the controversial clicking-tab-to-minimize feature (self: yay!!).

——

OK, preview 2 of V7.6 has finally been released.

Remember this is still a preview release.

Windows Changelog - Windows forum post
Linux Changelog - Linux forum post

There are some fairly large changes to the UI, and quite a lot of other fixes thrown in.

• Menus:
  • The menu structure has been radically pruned. The window menu is dead, replaced by context menu on the page bar (as a number of custom setups have done for a while). The biggest issue here is that single-click minimisation of pages has been deactivated, and is only available in the context menu. This will hopefully come back, at least as an option.
  • Navigation menu has been swallowed into the View menu, and chat consumed by Mail (now called messaging); both moves seem logical (though the semantic relationship of View and navigation is in doubt IMO).
  • The customisation options have all been removed (continuing from V7.5), and the Customize toolbar dialog now does most of that (suggested before by me and others, a good move IMO).
• Toolbars: - Some large changes here too.
  • New pages now have a start bar with some bookmarks and search options - it disappears as soon as the page is used.
  • Just like Jekyll&Hyde and the WebDevToolbar, a view button toggles an advanced view toolbar on/off, and some options like voice, author/user etc. have been placed there.
  • On the page bar, a new trash icon with closed pages AND blocked pop-ups is available, great to finally have a visual indicator (long overdue IMO).
  • The progress bar is off by default, but even so, a little progress field is available in the address field.
  • The MDI close/minimise/restore buttons have gone from the menu bar. Close buttons are now on every page tab (hopefully this will be optional before final!!!).
  • Security and RSS icons will now be shown inside the address field when needed.
• Others:
  • Secunia’s latest Tabbed browsing issue is now fixed.
  • TLS 1.1 is removed for now.
  • Several page display issues fixed, including better styling of forms.
  • New Option for blocking rogue javascript (stopping new windows disabling the address bar, good!)
  • Spell-checker has recieved an update - finally word contractions using an apostrophe and numbers are not being caught.
• Voice:
  • As discussed before, Voice libraries are now removed and optional. You need to enable voice in preferences for them to be downloaded and installed.
  • Bookmark nicknames can now be used for navigation!
  • More voice control for panels, and “speak” is a contextual option for web page text.
  • Voice pronunciation is now controllable.

——

Preview 1 of Opera V7.6 has been released.

• Voice control - Opera now supports CSS3 speech module and XHTML+Voice 1.2 - this allows web masters to use voice input to enter forms and select sections of the page to present audibly - a first for any browser. Opera V7.6 also allows voice control of browsing functions like back / forward - this control is customizable like mouse gestures.
• Support for DOM 3 Load & Save - and therefore XMLHttpRequest, XMLSerializer, and DOMParser - this basically means GMail now works in Opera.
• Start up Dialog - There is now the option of starting Opera as “just” a browser, or as an internet suite. The user can also choose to start without the personal bar and panel selector on first run to minimise UI clutter.
• In-line Error Pages - After what seems like an eternity, Opera have finally enabled support for errors on pages to stop popping up error requestors.
• Medium screen rendering - Very nice, it reformats the page to make sure the content fits the width of your browser page.
• Pipelining - Opera’s pipelining heuristic has been updated to (hopefully) better handle the increase in un-compliant HTTP/1.1 servers being seen in-the-wild.
• TLS 1.1 Security - Opera are also testing the new TLS V1.1 security standard; it seems some servers break using it. There is a prize-winning scavenger hunt on to find sites that break.

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