I'm happy to report that Opera Software's new web browser, called Opera 8, has continued its movement in the right direction. I blogged on some of their earlier progress with the Opera 7.6 Preview release and much more has improved since then, though most of my specific complaints are still unresolved.
This app is certainly lightyears ahead of Opera 7 and earlier versions. My big complaints are that the installer still has that unnecessary panel describing features, the statusbar is still not part of the default setup, the graphical ad setup is a lot less usable out of the box than the Google text ad setup, the menus, while much improved are still a bit confusing, the text selection cursor is still wrong, and the pop-up blocking doesn't provide any obvious feedback for cases where the default behavior is not what the user wants. That's not bad considering some of my earlier issues with Opera 7.5.
One other thing I'm already starting to dislike that Opera advertises itself as IE 6 [Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; en) Opera 8.0] and so gets handed quite a bit of IE specific content which it doesn't seem to handle all that well. Given how strong Opera's standards support is, wouldn't it make sense for it to identify, as Safari does, as "like Gecko" rather than like IE?
I've only been using it for a couple of days, but like I said, this is a much more usable browser and it's clear that Opera is moving in the Firefox direction. I'm certainly glad to see that Opera is starting to move away from it's niche focus on power-users and toward a larger audience. If Opera can continue to improve usability at this pace, and decides to offer a free version that isn't adware supported, I might consider using it some.
