Opera 7.5 Released

I tried every preview release of 7.50 before the final one and it really did get better all the time. Though I still don’t like the default layout, it doesn’t matter because it can easily be changed. There are facts that many regard as disadvantages: the interface is obviously cluttered, the features are terrifyingly numerous and don’t always play well together, there are pages that refuse to load etc. Personally I greatly appreciate choice - the fact that Opera exists, being yet another good option in the browser market. Were the interface a bit more modest, average users wouldn’t find out about many of its features. All innovations that Opera has introduced, I admit, were a bit crazy to stuff into one machine at the beginning, but over time they have began to play together almost seamlessly. Every next release has been a huge improvement over the previous one. This one is even more so. And as to the fact that some pages fail to load properly, it’s due to improper work of the webmaster in question - Mozilla and even IE fail from time to time for the same reason. The new features in 7.50 - IRC and RSS - together with all the previous innovations make Opera the best web application available. As I said I appreciate choice: world of browsers would be immensely poorer without Opera. If you haven’t tried Opera yet, you have really missed something.

I am rapidly becoming an Opera fan, in great part due to your heroic 31-part salute. Thanks for all the hard work.

I don’t suppose you’ve given thought to wrapping up your “30 Days To Becoming An Opera7 Lover” into a little book proposal, and seeing if anyone might be inclined to publish it, have you? It’s long enough, I think.

I have a question about Opera 7.5 — I only began using it yesterday, so you realize I am a true tyro on it — and it occurs to me that you’d likely be a better source for an anwer than the (doubtless swamped) Opera website itself. I frequently visit the weblog of a friend, which is hosted at Blogger (www.unfutz.blogspot.com). Via Internet Explorer (and, I know, as he intended) it displays as three vertical panels below a banner header: to the left, a blank panel; in the middle, his actual blog entries; to the right, additional information, notably his blogroll linking to favored blogs.

After installing Opera (but not necessarily having it yet set up correctly), I surfed there. The panel to the right is entirely missing. Can’t see it, can’t get it, if I didn’t know I wouldn’t have a clue it had ever been there.

But here’s the funny thing: when I made Opera my default browser, it somehow converted one of the icons on my desktop — for Hewlett-Packard support (the computer brand, brand new) — to an Opera icon. Clicking on it takes me where it always did, to HP’s updates page. Fair enough. But, as I discovered today, if I simply close that window, what’s left is Opera functioning as normal (were I to go to the HP site with IE6, and close it, the entire thing would close).

Okay, an interesting difference to a non-programmer. But here’s the really funny thing: if I do this — go to HP and then close that window, leaving Opera running — then go to my friend’s blog with it, the missing righthand panel is no longer missing. Suddenly, it’s there just as it should be.

What’s up with that? More to the point, how do I make my regular Opera (that is, the one launched by the Opera icon or name in Program File) behave this way?

I’ll wager dollars for doughnuts that the answer is brain-dead simple. I’ve just got some setting wrong, a setting that is automatically changed on the HP link version. But darned if I can find it!

Thanks for any info you can provide.

— Roger

P.S. — Am I just a dunderhead or what? I really thought it best to send this comment/question by private email, but for the life of me I can’t find your email link or address here. Am I just dense, or is it really not visible?