The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Now that Opera 8.0 Beta 2 is out, I can finally talk about my favorite changes. I'm very happy with this release, overall. We made excellent progress on bug fixes and solved some usability issues here and there. Anyway, here we go:

1. The Security information dialog. Now, when you click on the padlock in the address bar (or press Alt+Enter with focus on the document), you'll get a dialog with information about the level of security and certificates used on the site. The address bar now also shows the name of the certificate.
2. Typed URLs for redirects are remembered. If the URL you enter in the address bar or F2 dialog automatically redirects to another page, only the destination URL would show in the address bar and F2 history. Now, it shows both! This is a nice usability improvement, as Opera finally remembers the address I use to access my bank account.
3. EXIF data for JPEGs. In the image properties dialog, some simple EXIF data is now displayed, when available. Try it out!
4. Support for document.selection, document.getSelection, and friends. One of the most frequent DOM support requests has been for the document.selection family. Now, many forum and web logging software will work better with Opera. Hooray!

Oops, time to leave for the day. I'll see if I can fill out this list a bit on Monday so it can be a Top 10 list. Oh, and what are your favorite changes?

Opera 8.0 Beta 2 for Windows is expected to be released later today. However, the Unix release will not happen this week. It takes way too long to make all those Unix builds. Also, there will not be a Opera 8.0 Beta for Mac yet. We're aren't satisifed with the quality on Mac yet. We don't want to keep y'all waiting too long, so stay tuned.

Kudos to Google for allowing Opera access to Google Maps and not saying Opera is unsupported at Google Mail today. And that it happened the same day as we released Opera 8.0 Beta 2 makes it even cooler. :)

The IMAP testing is going very well. We haven't identified any major problems, but the new back-end isn't quite feature complete. The main remaining code work is in error-handling (i.e. the server says it can't do something and we have to respond accordingly). The code is improving steadily and that's what really counts.

We've run into a couple server-compatibility problems (as expected). Right now, we haven't enabled synching of the Deleted flag because some servers will automatically expunge when they shouldn't, thus messages will be deleted by the server before the user manually issues the expunge command (read: empty trash). If we can find a way to detect these servers, we can probably enable Deleted synching on standard-compliant servers and do something else on the other servers.

I just want to throw in a reminder that the current work is on the back-end and not the UI. That means the most common feature requests have not been addressed. But now, at least we'll be able to do something about most of them. The new back-end probably addresses bug reports more than anything. And since I prefer to see bugs fixed than features added, I'm pretty happy. :)

I have a feeling that our first release with the new IMAP back-end will be somewhat like Forté's Agent 2.0 release: there will be no clear changes to the end-user, but it will set the stage for future updates. Well, except the fact that there will be some clear improvements in the way Opera reacts to changes on the server or error situations.

And y'all *might* even get to test before I thought....

I receive a fair amount of e-mail quizzes, particularly from Helen, the poor girl devoid of the motivation to log in to this site when she leaves comments. The questions are sometimes interesting enough to share with others. So, I've added a new FAQ page. I'll try to update it with new quiz questions as I get them, too. I hope it answers all the questions about me that have just been tugging at your very being. If not, just ask.