Opera 8 Released

bonch writes "After a series of beta releases, Opera 8 final has now been released. Read the announcement complete with download links. The new Opera sports a streamlined interface and several rendering improvements."

Comments

Re:The question every firefox user is asking

[Tiger the Lion]

For adblocking, you should try Proxomitron. I've found this to be a god-send for browsing - blocks ads, popups, etc, etc. Plus, the blocklists are constantly being updated by dedicated users, and can be found at CastleCops. For Linux, try Privoxy.

Re:all-nine-users-cheer dept ??

[hkmwbz]

"I am becoming disenchanted with the direction that Opera Software is taking. Opera is becoming more bloated and more buggy with each release."

Huh? Opera 8 has had the longest period of testing ever. And even with all the built-in features it's still smaller and faster than Firefox.

Opera 8 is even faster than previous versions as well. I have no idea how you can be talking about "bloat" and "more buggy", when clearly, they are fixing stuff like mad, and with three betas and countless previews in addition to that, Opera 8.0 is an extremely solid release.

"Instead of fixing bugs, new features are being added, new features that themselves contain additional bugs."

Instead of fixing bugs? What are you talking about? Loads of bugs have been fixed during the beta tests. It is nothing but a blatant lie to claim that Opera has been fixing bugs instead of adding new features.

But so what if they add new features? It's a good thing! Opera is expanding. They can afford to hire more devs, both to add new features, and to fix bugs.

"Why do I need yet another mail reader in my browser?"

Opera has always had a built-in e-mail client, so the point is moot.

"On the other hand, I can get FireFox to have similar functionality to Opera only by loading a bunch of plug-ins."

Except Firefox has lots of bugs of its own. Just recently, 1.0.3 was released with critical security fixes, whereas Opera is the only browser of the "big three" with no unpatched vulnerabilities.