Some thoughts on the Opera 8.0 Beta

(Click for larger screenshot) OK, I was in the middle of writing a review of the Opera 8.0 Beta web browser, but I pressed a key combination that I would have thought would take me to the next tab, and it decided to erase my entire blog post.

So, in conclusion: Screw Opera, Opera sucks.

Things I did mention, when I was in a less foul mood, were that it is faster than FireFox, and handles tabs better. It lets you click on a tab and drag it out of the window and have that page become its own window. This could be implemented in FireFox fairly easily, though it would probably look like hell compared to Opera's much slicker UI.

Opera has voice support which, as far as I can tell, is pretty much useless, as you have to press a key on the keyboard before it will 'listen to you', to tell it to go back or refresh the page. Whoever thought that was a good HCI move should be fired. You also have to be loud, clear and slow when giving it voice commands, basically like talking to your deaf grandparents. Much easier just to use the keyboard. This bit of Microsoftian feature-creep is killing the veneer of Opera as a slick, no-nonsense piece of software. Granted it is only a Beta, but I can't see a use for this at all.

Opera's HTML handling still isn't up to par. Gmail now works, which is good, despite the fact that it wil tell you it isn't supported. Just click 'sign in anyway' and it will work just fine. Blogger's Composer still isn't supported at all, despite working perfectly well in FireFox and Internet Explorer. They should be working on fixing problems with the renderer before adding bullshit like voice input support.

Anyway, the beta is available to download from ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/800b1/en/std/ow32enen800b1.exe, and its worth a try, but I'll wait until the final release comes out before I'll consider replacing FireFox as my default web browser.

For the improved speed alone it is definitely 'almost there'.