Opera defies the odds, continuing to exist with a paid product in a market overwhelmed by free offerings. Is the latest version of Opera still worth digging into your wallet for? Read our Australian review.
There are two types of browser users out there. There's IE users (a sizeable chunk of the market, although exact figures seem to differ), and there's everyone else. For the IE entrenched crowd, the concept of using another browser, let alone actually paying for one, seems ludicrous. Yet that's exactly the model that Opera uses, and it does it by delivering features that IE has yet to implement, or, in some cases, by simply doing the same stuff better.
Version 7 of Opera offers a lot of promise, but like many products still in Beta stage, there's some significant bugs to stamp out before it becomes a truly compelling product.
Opera's the one major browser on the market that supports itself by selling its product. Previous releases have been made free, but on an advertising supported basis. In an interesting move, the beta version of Opera 7 disables ads for the first 14 days of browsing, in a quite deliberate move to give users the 'feel' of fully paid Opera before the ads kick in.
Along with the kind of visual configuration options that have been part of Opera for the last few releases, Opera 7 also promises a few new tricks. Skin support is still part of Opera, although some older Opera skins won't work within Opera 7. The default skin is a cool blue affair that looks vaguely reminiscent of Apple's OS X, although if that's your particular thing, more close matches are easily available. You can also specify to use specific style sheets, which range from the functional high-contrast and no tables modes to the quite amusing but ultimately pointless nostalgia mode, which emulates the output of a Commodore 64 in web style.
If you're developing pages, or just wondering how your favourite sites would look in PDA form, Opera can emulate small screen rendering with a press of SHIFT-F11. Rendering in Opera throughout has been reworked, and pages tended to load just a touch faster than in Opera 6. It's still close enough to Internet Explorer to be something of a hollow claim, however, and your browsing experience is still much more dependant on your connection speed than anything else.
The concept of browser side panels has also been around for some time, but Opera's done some interesting things in its version 7 release. By far our favourite is the links panel, which will display all the links on a given page in the sidebar for easy navigation. It's quick and responsive, and can make getting around link-heavy websites much less of a chore.
Bookmark control in Opera 7 Beta 2 is still more than a touch buggy. For a start, there's no evident way to sort bookmarks except alphabetically. Previous versions of Opera offered a 'view' option that allowed you to use a variety of sorting schemes, or define your own. We attempted to sidestep this by numbering our folders in the order we wanted them, only to find that while that worked fine in the hotlist, the bookmark folder itself then became an unholy mess; ideally the two should be identical, as they were in previous Opera versions.
Another new but not always useful feature in Opera 7 is the 'fast forward' function. If the browser application detects that you're moving from page to page in some sort of logical sequence, the forward button becomes a fast forward button, enabling quick navigation through any future pages without having to rely on in-page navigation links. In two weeks of solid browsing, however, we only found a handful of sites where fast forward actually worked; we're still not sure what the underlying mechanism looks for in a page link.
Opera 7 also integrates a password manager, something that both Netscape and IE have had for quite some time. Opera's version is called 'The Wand', and acts in a very straightforward manner, popping up every time you enter a password protected site. One thing that did annoy us is that there seems to be no way to set it to default off for everything; you can tell it to ignore individual pages, but not everything. We're not great fans of password managers, which seem to us like security breaches in the making, but your experience may vary from ours.
Opera's Mail and Newsgroup browsing has also undergone a transformation in Opera 7 with the inclusion of what Opera calls its M2 mail client. M2 provides a single list view of mailing lists, newsgroups and incoming email, and can be sorted and configured in a variety of ways. We found M2 somewhat tricky to get to grips with until we realised how tightly integrated the hotlist is with M2. Without it, you've got a single flat list of every message you've received with very little way to discern between message types. It's also still somewhat buggy, which you'd expect from a beta release; we often had to close M2 as it would no longer allow us to select items on its page.
Although it's still only at the beta stage, there's plenty of promise in Opera 7. It's unlikely to unseat IE as the mass market browser of choice - it'd have to be bundled with a major operating system, for a start - but even if all it does do is push for new and worthwhile features, it's a welcome addition to the browser software category.
Company: Opera
Price: Free via download with ad support, US$39
