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. :)