I sat down with one of the Mac Quality Assurance guys last week to see how Opera 7 for Mac is shaping up. And it is. There's a lot of work to do still, but it looks like it's really coming together. I'm not a Mac user, so I don't know the OS conventions. But it looks like it belongs there. And I know that's what our users want. Our developers have been working hard on trying to get that part right and I think they're doing a great job.
For instance, the reason I visited the Mac team was to talk about ways to improve the preferences across the desktop platforms. Mac applications seem to have the preference page selector at the top (released versions of Opera 7 for Windows and Linux have it on the right) with a minimal amount of options available on each page. Because Opera is so customizable, it's a challenge to find a good balance. IE has a preferences dialog similar to Opera, but (I think) Safari has the more typical Mac preference dialog. In any case, that's the kind of thing that Mac developers are thinking about. They don't want users to get just the Opera experience. They want users to get the Opera experience on a Mac. I hope we still have enough Opera enthusiasts left on the Mac to give it a chance when the time comes.
