Opera 6.0 for Windows Beta 1 released

November 13, 2001 2:48 AM

Opera 6.0 for Windows Beta 1 released
posted by gleemax (33 comments total)

It's nice to see that XML is supported. The fact that the DOM is still only partially supported is a disappointment, however.
posted by jeffvc at 3:09 AM on November 13, 2001

Oh man ... I hope they get this ported to Linux soon. I've got a paid-fer Opera license (two of them, actually), but I'm thinking of going to Mozilla. When I moved from Netscape v4 to Opera, it was like a breath of fresh air. There is still a lot that I really like about Opera, but Mozilla has really closed the gap. Right now my greatest gripe is that the Opera v5 bookmarks handling is painfully weak for a reasonably significant collection of bookmarks.
posted by chipr at 3:35 AM on November 13, 2001

woohoo.. what a happy thing to wake up to.
posted by lotsofno at 4:25 AM on November 13, 2001

Just in case anyone hadn't seen it, last Friday, Hakom responded to the MSN blockage of a couple weeks ago. He wasn't nice. Fun read.
posted by Su at 4:55 AM on November 13, 2001

After playing around awhile, I'm more than impressed. This is a significant jump. I was at first surprised, because I thought it'd be 5.5, but the 6.0 is more than justified.

The new standard icons rock! They're so cute. Favorite: the little heart for the personal bar. I immediately got rid of the nasty foreground image, though. I have yet to test if any new CSS stuff has been implemented.

I agree the lack of DOM support is significant, but personally it's not a big deal to me. I believe it's slated for the next release (in early 2002?).
posted by gleemax at 4:58 AM on November 13, 2001

Cool (I think PNG alpha channel support is new to 6.0).
posted by gleemax at 5:07 AM on November 13, 2001

For anyone unfamiliar with him: Håkon Wium Lie.
posted by gleemax at 5:12 AM on November 13, 2001

Go Hakom! Thanks for the link Su.
posted by mmarcos at 6:09 AM on November 13, 2001

Uhhh.... is there a free 6.0 version supported by ads?
posted by Witold at 7:13 AM on November 13, 2001

Yeah there is a free version, I'm using it now. Remember to remove your previous Opera installation, when I didn't at first I got all sorts of funky errors. Remember, YMMV. This is just a beta release and as a long standing beta user of their symbian browser I can say that their beta-1's aren't always massively cool. This is fun, a cool browser. But the lack of DOM support is really annoying. The CSS is somewhat better than before, if a little unforgiving to those used to MSIE. But we like it like that! All in all a good release.
posted by nedrichards at 7:35 AM on November 13, 2001

If anyone has tested it - how's the javascript/dHTML support thus far?
posted by mkn at 7:52 AM on November 13, 2001

I'm seeing less strange errors at JavaScript-heavy sites. That's good.

Remember to remove your previous Opera installation, when I didn't at first I got all sorts of funky errors.

I didn't get any strange errors. I did, however, install it in a new folder (gotta be careful) named Opera6.
posted by gleemax at 8:13 AM on November 13, 2001

I had the new folder. Still got nastyness, of course I'm more than happy to blame Win ME...
posted by nedrichards at 8:50 AM on November 13, 2001

I tend to agree. My friend has Win ME and he can't go more than a few hours (maybe a day?) without restarting. I still have Windows 95.
posted by gleemax at 8:58 AM on November 13, 2001

F12 brings up the following preferences window:

Accept pop-up windows
Refuse pop-up windows
Open pop-up windows in background

yummy.
posted by lescour at 9:00 AM on November 13, 2001

Gleemax: I used to watch my sister's ME computer crash constantly for absolutely no reason. We would leave the room, nothing running on the system, come back and it's frozen. Worst. Update. Ever.

Opera has the most enormous toolbars I've ever seen. Do they have small versions available yet? All the screenshots I found had different appearances, but no smaller.
posted by Su at 9:59 AM on November 13, 2001

Happy Happy Joy Joy!
posted by signal at 10:19 AM on November 13, 2001

There's no "small" buttons option right now with the 6.0 beta. But, you can copy across the "Buttons\DefSmall" folder from the 5.x version, and that works fine:

Preferences > Browser Look > Button Set

"C:\Program Files\Opera\Buttons\DefSmall\buttons.ini"

(Uncheck "Always colored buttons".)
posted by holgate at 10:27 AM on November 13, 2001

Opera has the most enormous toolbars I've ever seen. Do they have small versions available yet? All the screenshots I found had different appearances, but no smaller.

Try disabling the text underneath them (I think this puts the status bar (if it's on top) to the right of the buttons, too, which I kinda like). It's also very easy to use Opera without the buttons. (Ctrl+N, new window, gesture commands for moving around, F5 for reload, Esc for stop, etc. Hit Ctrl+B for keyboard shortcuts.) Also, like holgate said.
posted by gleemax at 11:46 AM on November 13, 2001

This is what I'm talking about, btw.
posted by gleemax at 11:52 AM on November 13, 2001

I wish I could drag links from one window to another, my favorite way to surf, and one that my current installation of opera won't allow.

does this one?
posted by rebeccablood at 1:02 PM on November 13, 2001

XML support... does anyone know what that's supposed to mean? A useless XML tree or XSL or what, exactly?

I mean my arse has XML support by this point. Not that I'm proud of it.
posted by holloway at 1:12 PM on November 13, 2001

Rebecca--not with my installation of the beta on Win2K. It doesn't seem to recognize any kind of link-dragging (it just selects like any other click-and-drag).

I do love the way you can swap and edit individual image files for all the buttons and widgets (I guess you could do that with the last version too).

Does anyone have the non-ad-supported version who could post a screenshot? That ad really takes up a lot of screen real estate.
posted by owen at 1:41 PM on November 13, 2001

holy shyt. i just got home from school/work and got a chance to install and play with it a little. i would not be overexaggerating when i say that it is definitely the bombsnigglesnapbopboom. owen, here's your screenshot. (50 KB). i shrunk it to 800x600.
posted by lotsofno at 3:19 PM on November 13, 2001

::couple minutes later:: oh my god, these guys rock. they actually added the same quick amazon search like they did with google before. you just need to type in "z" and then what you want to search for, and it searches for that on amazon. also, you can search on the page by typing "f" and then your string. saves me another keystroke.
posted by lotsofno at 3:23 PM on November 13, 2001

does anybody know how to turn off http 1.1 in Opera? My computer resolves URL's wrong when I use 1.1.
posted by signal at 3:39 PM on November 13, 2001

They've supported alpha-channel in PNGs?

Woohoo! Finally! MAN, I've been waiting for this.
posted by cx at 8:34 PM on November 13, 2001

I have absolutely NO idea what Opera is, other than the fact it's a internet browser, like MS Explorer or Netscape (which I got from reading the link). Is this something accessible only to people in the computer industry (like all/most of you)? I also have no idea what most of the comments mean, does that make me uncool?
posted by Rastafari at 8:53 PM on November 13, 2001

This made my day, proving what a loser I have become. I love it... I haven't had a problem at all with it yet, either.

I use the cheapo free version, too.

i love how easy it is to skin it. The new buttons are nice, and it is great for someone like me using a computer and connection slower than liza minelli playing arena football against dwarves.
posted by zenhues at 8:57 PM on November 13, 2001

Again: WHY NO FINISHED OPERA FOR MAC?
posted by ParisParamus at 9:04 PM on November 13, 2001

Why no finished Opera for the Mac? Maybe because it's hard enough to make a buck selling browsers. I would try to target the widest market first too if I were them.
posted by owen at 3:54 AM on November 14, 2001

Owen, so the idea of perpertual beta versions is to maintain a lower-level Mac presence; one with a kind of disclaimer so that no one confuses it with a full-fledge one? That actually makes sense. Interesting. Opera for Mac is more than twice as fast on certain types of Web sites.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:27 AM on November 14, 2001

By the way, Opera 6.0 Beta 1 for Windows (both build 998 and build 999) have a memory leak (at least under Win9x/ME). This should be fixed by Beta 2 (and I believe Beta 2 is due out in a week or two).
posted by gleemax at 2:18 AM on November 20, 2001