Opera 3.5b

Thomas Dowling tdowling at ohiolink.edu
Thu Sep 17 17:08:56 EDT 1998


For those of you who keep current on browsers other than the Big Two,
Opera has posted the first public betas of its new version, Opera 3.5.
It's available at <URL:http://opera.nta.no/download.html> and also TUCOWS,
Download.Com, etc.  The most current version, as of today, is Beta 8.

Opera is fast and small (the download still fits on a floppy disk),
remarkably configurable, and full of useful ideas that other browsers
never seem to pick up.  Opera 3.5 adds the ability to use Sun's Java
plug-in and probably the best implemetation of Cascading Stylesheets
anyone has ever made.

To top it all off, the company responds to--and acts on--bug reports.

Opera is not yet a perfect browser by any means: it does not support HTML
4, Unicode, or PNG graphics; it runs under Windows only; Java via a
plug-in won't win any races; and its multiple document interface strikes
some users as wrong for a browser.  It also doesn't try to offer
full-fledged e-mail and news clients, choosing instead to coexist with
external applications better than most browsers.  It is also not free; it
costs US$35 to register.  For that and other reasons, you're probably not
going to put it on a hundred public workstations, but you may very well
want to have it on your own desktop.

Thomas ("Not an employee, just a satisfied customer") Dowling
OhioLINK - Ohio Library and Information Network
tdowling at ohiolink.edu



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