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February 06, 2003
Opera 7.01 First Impressions
I'm sure even the great tenor Placido Domingo had nights where the voice wasn't up to snuff. So I guess I shouldn't be surprised when a company releases an update before its time.
I recently installed the Opera 7.01 browser (see their site here). Long-time readers, all eleven of you, will remember that I have been a proponent of Opera for years. There is much to like about a program that is relatively small, fast, secure, and standards compliant.
But I can not recommend this browser in its current state and am very disappointed that Opera would release this obviously unfinished version. Here's why.
This version of Opera has what I consider to be several show stopping bugs - some of which are intermittent and some not. The transfer window, even though it has a place for the amount of bytes transferred in real time, fails to display anything, even when the transfer is done. When I click on the bookmarks menu, it opens three panels, but refuses to let me see any other book marks past the third panel. When setting preferences, I went from the "Browser look" heading to accessibility and found that the display was not fully updating. That is, parts of it changed to the new section, parts of stayed the same, and parts of it became transparent and I could see the wallpaper behind it. The next time I went in it worked fine.
This version has apparently moved valued features and made them complex to implement. Version 6.05 included, in Preferences, the ability to customize the browser's layout. Included here were options for displaying only icons or icons with text, whether the icons should be fixed width or variable, and whether the "Go" button should be displayed. While you can now right click on the icons and set text below, you must turn off the the special effects found under "Skins" if you want the text to be displayed all the time (as opposed to only when you hover your mouse over them). This is different, but is it better?
This version seems to begin the display of web pages slower than 6.05. I opened both versions and pointed both to a website neither had recently cached - www.novell.com. Version 6 almost immediately began to display the site while downloading the approximately 90k of html code. I stopped version 7 after it said it had download over 1MB of HTML! This, when it hadn't even displayed anything yet!!! I decided to try another site - www.disney.go.com. Version 6.05 still started to build the page before version 7.01, but version 7.01 did finish a fraction of a second faster. I figured I'd do one more test so pointed both to www.sun.com. Once again, version 6.05 began displaying the page first but version 7.01 finished first.
Based on these problems, you may want to stay with 6.05 or Mozilla until Opera 7.x stabilizes. YMMV.
Aloha!
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