Opera Releases New Talking Web Browser
Opera 8 Beta 1 has been in development since a long time. With long preview cycle of the version 7.6 series, it looks like Opera decided to rename the latest version as Beta of Opera 8. No Changelog is out yet from the company but expect bug fixes and improvements on the preview release 4 of 7.6 version. They recently did say in a press release that a version is expected by the year-end, but most expected it to be the final of Opera 7.60.
Now, what the users would be speculation about is when the final is launched. Opera 7.54 is the current latest stable release from the company and the preview releases have added voice support and ERA. Voice support let users issue voice commands for certain functionalities in Opera Browser. In fact Opera can now read back web pages to the users. ERA or Extensible Rendering Architecture is a revolutionary feature that has been in the development since many versions in the form of SSR (Small Screen Rendering) and MSR (Medium Screen Rendering).
It lets the browser re-render webpages to fit the width of the window size of the browser on any platform. Therefore, websites, which are wider than the browser screen fit into the width of any kind of internet accessing devices running the Opera Browser. This also helps in the printing of webpages as pages shrink to fit any page sizes.
This version is expected to get a public release tomorrow as company is currently mirroring the version on the servers.
Download: Opera 8 Beta 1
Sushubh Mittal is the Tech Columnist at the Search Engine Journal, Editor of TechWhack, and an Opera Enthusiast
Opera is a great piece of software. Thier RSS support for me is better than that of Firefox but the only problem i have is that it doesn’t render corectly Yahoo! Mail & Gmail. At least those 2 sites i spotted but due to the fact i use them on a daily basis….hmmm still Firefox .
Another issue is the lack of external extensibility which seems to be a trend that Opera ignores. And that means everything from the lack of extensions made by other users and toolbars from third parties (A9 Toolbar for ex.)
Someone can argue that is the duty of third party producers to make compliant software…but i think that is not enough support for them to do that. A9 for ex have made a Firefox compliant toolbar because they had the documentation
I use Opera, Netscape, Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, and KDE Konqueror. Different browsers for different needs, although Mozilla is a derivative of Netscape. Why limit yourself!! I also have over 20 email addresses, each for a different use, such as banking, chat, product registration, website registration, utility bills, ect..
I also use windows xp pro, 2000 pro, me, and 95, no “98″ yet!!
and various flavors of linux and bsd.
Hi – big thanks (great site!).