Opera 3.5b

[Thomas Dowling]

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