7.50 Preview 1 for Windows

Info

Announcements

Changelogs

Major new features

User interface redesign

This release includes a prototype design of Opera's user interface, which has been revamped to make it cleaner and more intuitive. The ad banner has been reformatted into an ad bar at the top of the Opera window. The main menus have been restructured so they aren't as cluttered. There's a new "Tools" menu for items such as managing cookies, contacts, and Wand. All toolbar customizations are now done through the Customize toolbars dialog. The main and personal bars have been turned off and the most used web page buttons have been moved to the address bar. Any toolbar can be set to "Show only when needed" (most useful for the Navigation and Page bars).

Panels improved

As part of the user interface improvements, Opera's panels are now more functional. The Hotlist has been renamed to Panels. The panel selector now defaults to the left and is always visible. Clicking panel names or pressing F4 toggles the display of Panels (ESC closes Panels). Panels can be maximized using Shift+F4, by clicking the maximize icon, or by double clicking on the panel selector. Maximized panels act as replacements for management dialogs used for things like contacts and bookmarks. All panels have toolbars and a panel selecting button at the top. Custom panels have toolbars to allow Reload (F5), zooming, and SSR display of panels. Also, the "X" to close Panels is back.

Start panel

One of the user interface prototypes in this release is the Start panel, a portal to Opera and the web. Accessible from the Panel selector, the Start panel is always maximized and allows you to easily go to a web site, search the Internet, or search your e-mail. This is only a taste of things to come!

Reintroducing M2

The M2 back-end has been completely redesigned to make searching faster and to meet various user needs. Searches of hundreds of thousands of messages should take ~1 second. Additionally, the Start search box now has a drop-down of every word in every message, so it auto-completes as you're typing. Each account will have its own directory with one mbox file per month. The Mail directory will also include a lexicon, which indexes every word in every e-mail.

RSS Newsfeeds

Opera now has experimental support for RSS Newsfeeds (RSS 0.9x, 1.0, and 2.0)--a syndication format often used on weblogs and news services--as part of Opera Mail. You can choose from a selection of pre-installed feeds by choosing "Newsfeeds" from the Mail menu. Newsfeeds are shown in the Mail panel under the Newfeeds access point. Please have a look at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss/ for more information about RSS.

Opera Chat

Opera now has experimental support for IRC, our first protocol back-end for Chat. You can easily setup a chat account Chat menu by selecting "New account". Chat channel and server information is shown in the Chat panel. Additionally, you can use Chat > List rooms (Ctrl+Alt+J) to list available channels once you've connected to a server. To aid in testing and to give y'all a place to hang out, we've setup our own IRC network: OperaNet. There are currently two servers: irc.opera.com and irc.se.opera.com.

Spelling checker

Opera now has the ability to work seemlessly with external spelling checkers, such as Aspell (http://aspell.net/). The Windows installer and quite a few dictionaries are available at http://aspell.net/win32/ (you need to download both the installer and at least one dictionary for Aspell to work). The spelling checker works in Opera Mail compose windows and multi-line form inputs. After installing Aspell, just restart Opera and it should be detected automatically. Aspell is free and open source. Opera will define a public API (based on unicode/utf-8) and will release source code for an example implementation hooking up to Aspell, so other spelling checkers can eventually work with Opera.

Learning message filter

Opera Mail sports a new learning message filter. Enabled on the Filter tab of View properties, the Learning filter works for the Spam view and custom views. To teach the learning filter which mails you'd like in a particular view, simply drag some mails to the view. While teaching the filter, it's likely that it will incorrectly put certain mails into the filtered view. If this occurs, simply select the mails and use Ctrl+X or choose Delete>Remove from view from the Message window toolbar to remove them from a custom view or click the Not spam button in the Spam view. Remember, this learning filter doesn't apply to only spam--it can be used with any custom view!

Override Browser Stylesheet

It's now possible to override the default browser CSS stylesheet. Simply put a file called 'browser.css' in the directory \profile\styles\ (you may need to create that directory) with the rules you'd like to use. This has several advantages over using a user.css file. For instance, if you always want PRE elements to be wrapped, add the rule 'PRE { white-space: pre-wrap; }'. The browser.css file overrides the default browser CSS stylesheet and is overridden by author and user stylesheets.

Important Changes

User Interface

Opera Mail (M2)

Display

Keyboard/Mouse

Other

Detailed Changes

Cookies

Display

Forms

Images

Java

JavaScript/ECMAScript/DOM

Keyboard/Mouse

Kiosk Mode

Opera Mail (M2)

Preferences

  [User Prefs]
  Use Smiley Images=1

 [User prefs]
 Max width for bookmarks in menu=200

 [User Prefs]
 Entities In Forms=0

Printing

Security

Transfers

User Interface

Wand