Changelog for Opera 8.0 for Windows
Opera 8 is available for download.
Release Notes
- This release includes significant security enhancements and fixes vulnerabilities in previous Opera versions and is a recommended upgrade. Upgrading is free of charge for users who have purchased an Opera 7 license.
- The release features whitelisting of top-level domains that have implemented anti-homographic character policies or otherwise limited the available set of characters to prevent URL spoofing through use of internationalized domain names (IDN).
- Registrars wishing to be added to Opera's whitelist must inform Opera Software of their policies and have these approved.
At first Glance
- New and improved security features
- Voice support
- "Fit to window width" abolishes horizontal scrolling
- Improved default menu and toolbar setups
- Support for XmlHttpRequest giving full Gmail support
- New Start bar gives easy access to useful features
- Notification of blocked pop-ups
- Simple retrieval of closed pages and blocked pop-ups.
- Elegant e-mail attachment handling
- Improved newsfeed reader
- Automated weekly check for new updates
- New User JavaScript feature
A separate changelog listing changes since Beta 3 is available.
Changes since 7.54u2
User Interface
- Improved default toolbar and menu setup. Most important changes:
- Messaging and newsfeed menus added dynamically as accounts and subscriptions are set up.
- "Window" menu is added if user opts not to display close buttons on each tab in .
- Removed "Navigation" menu.
- New Start bar drops down from the address field to allow quick access to home page, bookmarks, and the user's most visited pages.
- New View bar toggled by button on address bar contains settings for modifying the page view, including new "Fit to window width" feature.
- Yellow security bar displayed inside address field on secure pages.
- Improved preference dialog. Most important changes:
- Split into four tabs; General, Wand, Web pages, and Advanced.
- Added preferences for showing notification pop-ups for messages, blocked pop-ups, and completed file transfers ()
- The former "Customize toolbars" dialog is now located in and includes the skin settings.
- Notification of blocked pop-ups from trashcan drop-down button on page bar, which also allows for retrieval of closed pages and blocked pop-ups.
- Added dialog for reporting sites that do not work well with Opera. Available in the "Help" menu.
- Added integrated Opera Web search with keyword 'S'.
- When starting download, allow transfer dialog to stay in the background.
- Multiple keyboard shortcut changes and additions. For a complete overview of the default keyboard shortcuts, press Ctrl+B
- Disabled keyboard shortcuts involving Alt Gr during inline find to prevent interference with typing of special characters.
- "Save with images" is now an option within the save dialog, found in the "File type" drop-down menu.
- Added support for simple Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) information in properties of .jpg files.
Display and standards
- Implemented Opera's Extensible Rendering Architecture (ERA):
- Added "Fit to window width" feature that squeezes page contents to make them fit the width of the screen and avoid horizontal scrolling.
- The "Small screen" mode now includes more of the page's original styling.
- Implemented support for Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Tiny. See SVG demonstrations.
- New User JavaScript feature
- Support for XmlHttpRequest -- Gmail Web mail fully supported.
- Support for CSS3 speech module (properties new to CSS3 are prefixed by "-xv-") and XHTML+Voice 1.2
- Support for DOM3 Load and Save.
- Fixed styling issues with the <fieldset> tag; makes the Wordpress administrative interface display correctly.
- Transparent background (wmode) support for plug-ins.
- Changed calculated line height to be based on actual font size rather than specified font size.
- Allow mixing of background-position and keyword, in accordance with CSS2.1.
- Borders on text fields can be removed with CSS.
- Require "dir" attribute for BDO elements to be valid and override bidi in standards mode.
- JavaScript pop-ups now respect general scroll bar settings.
- Implemented
XMLHttpRequest.getAllResponseHeaders and XMLHttpRequest.getResponseHeader
- Added support for
RegExp.leftContext and RegExp.rightContext
- Web specifications supported in Opera 8
Printing
- Added "Fit to page" feature that squeezes page contents and prevents margin overflow.
- Background images now printed by default.
Messaging
- E-mail and chat account handling moved to the "Tools" menu. "Mail" and "Chat" added to main menu and panels when the corresponding accounts are set up.
- The contacts panel is only displayed if e-mail or chat accounts are set up.
- Improved handling of e-mail attachments
- Attachments in sent and received messages are now displayed above the message header.
- New "Save attachments" dialog allows for saving multiple attachments in one operation.
- Attached images are also displayed in the message body.
- To display all attachments inside messages as in previous versions, add "Show Attachments Inline=1" to the [User Prefs] section of opera6.ini
- Improved handling of contacts with multiple e-mail addresses.
- Added options to mark message threads as read (keyboard shortcut M) and go to next unread thread (shortcut N.
- Several improvements to quick reply: expand automatically when typing multiple lines, handle one draft per message, and reset focus to message list after replying.
- When user sets up a gmail.com account in the "New account" wizard, correct values are filled out automatically.
- Improvements to chat client
- Status is now set globally in the chat menu.
- Added "ban" and "kick with reason" commands, as well as typed "/invite" command.
- Support for irc: URLs.
- List of servers updated and expanded.
- IRC settings are now stored in incoming options file rather than in accounts.ini.
- Setting in IRC account properties for whether or not to accept incoming connections.
Newsfeeds
- Newsfeed reader is available without activating e-mail client. Separate "Feeds" entry added to main menu when first newsfeed subscription is activated.
- Support for and auto-detection of Atom newsfeeds.
- Newsfeed icon displayed inside address field when newsfeeds are linked from a page. Click to subscribe.
- Improved detection of HTML content in newsfeed items.
- Default time between checks for newsfeed updates set to 3 hours.
Voice
- New feature -- Windows 2000 and XP only.
- Control Opera's interface and navigate Web content using your voice.
- Support for Web pages written in XHTML + Voice (requires document to be served with an XML MIME type)
- Read more about Opera with Voice
Miscellaneous
- Automated version check performed weekly to ensure user has the latest and most secure Opera version.
- Added automatic downloading of language files if the language is selected and the file is available for download.
- Enabled downloading of the file ua.ini, which specifies how Opera should identify itself to specific Web sites.
- Can be edited manually.
- 1 = Identify as Opera
- 2 = Identify as Mozilla
- 3 = Identify as Internet Explorer
- 4 = Identify as Mozilla, hide Opera ID completely
- 5 = Identify as Internet Explorer, hide Opera ID completely
- File updated automatically through the Opera version check. Local edits will not be overwritten.
- Allow redirect URLs to be loaded from cache. Improves offline browsing.
- '$' in searches now works as intended.