Opera 7 Beta

Opera just released the first beta of its latest version, 7.0. I wonder if anyone remembers when I reviewed the Opera 6.0 beta. (Yes, that there was a link to the now-defunct LSP Online. Don’t you just love web archaeology?) In that article, I wrote that Opera began to “drive away its base and veteran users, including me.” Well, I think they’re just securing my loyalty to the Mozilla project now. The new beta is just way too “flashy” for my tastes. The buttons all light up gradually, like some Flash application. I wouldn’t ever use something like that for everyday browsing. But I do have to commend the Opera developers for, by rewriting the software, making the browser faster and more standards-compliant. And they’ve added great new features for web development, which I will probably use sometimes. So it’s not all bad. But I’ll still stick to Mozilla Phoenix for now.