| Opera 8 fancy features fascinate, fundamental faults frustrate |
Apr. 26, 2005
 The newly released Opera 8 web browser promises greater speed and security, automatic scaling to any window size, and even speech recognition support (for Windows users). BusinessWeek Online editor Anick Jesdanun finds Opera 8's bells and whistles impressive, but uncovers a few deal-breaker faults.
Jesdanun praises many of Opera 8's features, finding that many old favorites -- tabbed browsing, RSS support, and some security features -- surpass Firefox's equivalents. A plethora of new features also dazzle. Speech recognition works as promised, even without training the program to recognize the user's voice. A trashcan conveniently stores previously closed pages, just in case. Security options, like managing stored cookies, are obvious and easy to use.
The fit-to-screen width feature also lives up to Opera's claims, and Jesdanun reports that Opera 8 does, in fact, eliminate the need for a horizontal scrollbar, as advertised. However, this new feature seemes to cause as many problems as it solved, Jesdanun writes, with flash-heavy sites shrunk in their entirety, rendering the text unreadable.
Among other complaints, Jesdanun found that Opera 8 was unable to handle critical functions like email through AOL, emptying the junk mail folder at Hotmail, or the text entry form at LiveJournal. Jesdanun also had trouble with the menu options at Expedia.
At $39 for a registered version, compatible with only Windows and Linux (a Mac OS version of Opera 8 is currently in beta), Jesdanun seems to find little temptation to switch from the free Firefox browser to Opera 8.
Read more of BusinessWeek Online reviewer Anick Jesdanun's Opera 8 raves and rants here:
New Opera browser fails at basics
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