Getting to grips with Opera 9 Preview…. and wishing for OperaMini

I'm not alone in having spent the past few days getting to grips with the preview release of Opera 9. The change-log alone is worth looking at, and certainly some of the very basic improvements such as highlighting all the search results for 'find in page' are an immediate plus. The main changes though are in the background and promise even better and more accurate browsing. In the short term though, using the preview version loses some functionality (unless you want to tweak). The user-determined site spoofing via the ua.ini is now done differently (so I would need to set those up again), and there are some regressions with newsfeeds and auto-reload functions. That said, I've been hammering it pretty hard today and haven't run into any problems. There's fierce debates on the beta forum about some of the changes, such as bookmark highlighting in the address bar (horrid if you have a minimal amount of space for addresses) and the remapping of keyboard short-cuts. But that's the point of a preview. These things will get worked out through hard testing and user feedback.

The other news is that there's now a beta version of an updated OperaMini. Currently it's restricted to Nordic countries, and I've not spotted any 'leaked' versions for a Palm as yet so I'll make do with version 1 (which did do the rounds). So I'm deeply jealous, as I'd love to give the update a run out. The promise is of a world-wide release in the foreseeable future. In case you don't know, OperaMini real web-browsing over any java-enabled mobile phone. Which counts me out… as my mobile is too lite/old even for that.

Finally, here's a truly terrible photo, which probably won't show as anything at all if you have a darkish screen. It should be ok on a bright flat-screen. It's a game called "Spot the Fox". No prizes for the correct answer though… (there are two foxes in the picture).