Opera 7.50 Is Out

Without much fanfare Opera has released an updated version of its browser, v.7.50. Compared to its predecessor, ver 7.23, has a redesigned user interface and comes with nice toolbar on the side with all the handy tools you use on the web. One of my favorite ones is Notes because I often feel prompted to write something down when I visit an interesting site. What I'm also impressed with is the built-in newsgroup and RSS readers! The Usenet reader is very slick and the RSS aggregator... hey, it's perfectly functional and it's beta than nothing. It'll get there. :) I'm excited, very excited.

For those who don't know Opera is a great browser with outstanding support of web standards. It even goes as far as supporting some of CSS3 properties so its further commitment is crystal clear. It also comes with a slew of accessibility features for impaired users. Its Text Zoom tool has been around for some time now.

In the words of Opera's CEO, Jon S. von Tetzchner,

"Most Internet users are browsing slowly and conducting other Internet activities with applications that should have been retired years ago. Internet Explorer is an aged application that Microsoft has not given a major update in years, and according to press reports they are not planning to upgrade it in the near future."

I think this should be a wake-up call for certain people.

Opera should be one of your testing browsers along with Mozilla / Firefox / Netscape. If you think whatever looks nice in Internet Explorer will look nice everywhere you are in for a big surprise. As it is often the case, it's the fault of IE itself. Test your design in Opera and Mozilla first and then move on to IE.