BrowserWatch: Opera 6.0 TP Beta 2 Released

[ Thanks to Anderson Silva for this
link. ]

“Opera Software has officially released a second
Technology Preview of Opera 6.0 for Linux.

There have been many changes made to Opera 6.0 for Linux between
Technology Previews 1 and 2. Here is a list of the changes from the
official changelog:”

Complete Story and link

While we’re on the subject, NewsForge has written up a review of
the first tech preview release:

“I wasn’t surprised that “easy” pages like Google,
Yahoo, and Linux.com were rendered quickly and fully. I soon
started trying pages that present difficulty or don’t render
correctly (or at all) with Netscape. Many of them looked a lot
better with Opera. It seems that because of better default fonts,
most anything is more legible under Opera than under Netscape. I
also found that Opera correctly renders most CSS-style directives,
including text-only hover effects and font sizes. Over the course
of two days, I was not able to find a page Opera couldn’t display.
My hat is off to the people at Opera for understanding that that
poor HTML structure should not lead to missing information on a
page, a point Netscape missed a long time ago.

Opera also possesses some unique features, such as a persistent
Google search bar, searchable bookmarks, and something called mouse
gesturing. Gesturing is a neat concept, but will take almost anyone
some acclimation time before it becomes useful. For instance,
right-clicking on a blank spot in a page and moving the mouse
upwards then releasing the mouse button causes the browser to
reload the page. A similar motion, but moving the mouse downwards,
causes a new browser window to open. There are a host of these
shortcuts, and I see the potential for them to be useful once
you’ve gotten the hang of them. As with most any feature in Opera,
mouse gesturing can be turned off easily.

What I did find to be missing from the Linux version of Opera
6.0 was an email client. The Windows version of Opera contains a
useable and highly integrated email application that seems to have
been completely removed from its Linux counterpart. For most users,
this won’t be an issue; however, it would be nice to have Opera’s
features completely synchronous across platforms. Perhaps this will
be included in the production version of Opera 6.0 for Linux, even
though previous Linux versions of Opera have not included an email
client.”

Complete
Story