Still an Opera user

It seems that the upgrade to 8.0 final fixed my CPU-sucking problem with Opera. Or maybe it's the fact that I started over with a fresh config directory. It's hard to tell. Over the years, I've found that sometimes Opera behaves better if you start with a clean configuration.

The new version is nice, but no nicer than the 7.6 beta release, if you ask me. The new tab interface is the only reason I stayed with the beta releases rather than reverting to the 7.54 stable version. It's also kind of cool that they added a spell checker, but it's not half as good as the one Konqueror has. Opera just has a regular, on-demand spell checking utility, whereas Konqueror highlights misspelled words as you type. The "recycle bin" for closed tabs is creative and comes in handy every now and then, but it's not exactly a killer feature. Likewise, the new, stripped-down default interface is nice, but it isn't much different from what I had set up myself.

It's also nice that they thought to redo the preferences dialog, but I don't think it's any better than before. In fact, it might even be worse. In previous versions, they has the old-fashioned list box on the left that you used to change between the preferences pages, much like Mozilla. Now they have a tabbed dialog. The only problem is that they have only four tabs, the last of which is an "advanced" tab that just contains the familiar old list box, except moved out of sight. It seems pretty pointless to me. I would have preferred if they'd spent the time on a menu editor or search editor. Or maybe they could have fixed printing.

Of course, the best part is that they didn't make me pay for this upgrade - my old registration code worked! I'm glad they did this, because I'm not sure I could justify paying for this upgrade. The new version is great, but it just doesn't feel like they've added much that I care about. It feels kind of like upgrading Microsoft Office - sure, the new version is better and has more features, but why pay again when the old one does everything I want?

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