Simon Willison’s Weblog

Opera 7 Beta

Opera have released the first public beta of their new browser, Opera 7. The new version promises to be smaller, faster and have better DOM support than Opera 6. My observations so far:

• They have a navigation bar (as seen in Mozilla, additional navigation based on any <link> elements on the page)
• Stylesheet switchers (as seen on ALA, meyerweb, Wired) work—a clear indication of better DOM support
• Funky DHTML effects from nested lists (as seen on gazingus and kryogenix) do not work. Looks like the DOM support isn’t quite there yet.
• Some pages fail to display in a readable form at all—examples so far are SurfMind and bodytag.org (which continues loading infinitely—when I stopped it it had already downloaded over 3MB according to Opera’s status bar).
• Javascript errors are accompanied by a popup window containing a back trace and extracts from the code that went wrong. Nice.
• When it works, it’s fast.
• A preview feature for small-screen browsing has been included—hit shift-F11 to see what a page would look like on an Opera small-screen enabled mobile device.

Verdict: Needs work—but then it’s a beta so that’s pretty much to be expected.