Opera 9.5
![[Opera 9.5 splash page graphics]](https://ztoe.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/opera9_5.jpg)
Nice, with the coloured swooshes.
Opera 9.50 was released yesterday. The interface is substantially changed: the Windows and Mac versions features more styling cues from Vista and Leopard respectively. On the Mac this skin is called “Macintosh Native.” The alternative “Opera Standard” has reflective gradients on the tab buttons and red Vista “x”s on the top of each tab. The placement of the tabs above the main address/navigation bar seems like a strange choice—feels distracting to me, and seems to break the hierarchy of Application controls → Window controls → Sub-window controls that most browsers use. It seems you can’t change this positioning either. On the rendering side, Opera now supports last-child which is good news for fluid blockquote styles ;-) It also starts up a lot faster and page drawing feels blazingly quick (it’s a new rendering engine). There’s also support for some HTML5 elements. On the downside, the address bar uses an auto-suggest feature that seems to have too much going on. Maybe it needs some getting used to.
Update: I have to fess up that I never noticed the tabs-above-address bar in the previous version of Opera before. Perhaps I noticed it in 9.5 because in both Mac and Windows versions the background colour on the tab bar is quite dark and contrasts heavily against the selected tab and address bar. Also, Application controls → Window controls → Sub-window controls was pretty inaccurate. I think I meant Application controls → Global viewport controls → Current viewport. The more I think about it, Opera’s way makes sense if you think of a tab as a mini-browser, rather than another viewport. Still, I don’t like it. Go figure.
oddly enough, ff3 has that too-suggestive auto-suggest “feature” as well.
http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9944662-2.html
that, plus it crashing approximately 20 times a day, is why i devolved back to ff2. i’ll try putting opera in my stable of test browsers – does it have anything that compares to firebug and web developer toolbar?
June 13th, 2008 at 4:43 pm #
does it have anything that compares to firebug and web developer toolbar?
Yes, Dragonfly: http://www.opera.com/products/dragonfly (alpha). I haven’t tried it. The standard View menu in Opera also provides a lot of the quick manipulations that web developer does (images, small screen, scripting, etc.). Let me know what you think if you try it out.
June 13th, 2008 at 6:35 pm #