Opera 7 is Coming

Opera casts off legacy code for speed on CNet’s News.com provides basically a press release about Opera’s new 7.0 browser, dubbed Presto. Latest information on the 7.0 release is available on Opera software’s 7.0 page.

“Dubbed Project Presto, after the musical tempo-character marking indicating speed and lightness, the rewritten browser was designed to make Opera both faster and more compatible with the Document Object Model (DOM), an emerging standard technology that lets scripts, like JavaScript, act on individual elements of a Web page.”

DOM-support is the only place where Opera is really lacking. Their CSS and other standards support is outstanding and the browser and rendering engine are already cross-platform, extremely fast, and relatively bug-free, not to mention almost entirely crash-free. It has a small hard-drive and memory footprint and tons of usability features. Why rewrite it? After all, as “Opera Software co-founder and CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner” has said, “Our old engine wasn’t that bad”.

“Opera Software employs about 60 engineers. When Project Presto began 18 months ago, two of them were working on it; now a majority have left the legacy Opera code behind.” Since it’s apparent Opera has spent so much time on the new version, which “has been rewritten from the ground up”, it’s no surprise now that several shortcomings in the current browser haven’t been addressed. Why update Javascript and DOM functionality in the old engine when the new one is almost ready and already does everything better and faster? This should be very reassuring to Opera users; desktop platform users haven’t been abandoned for the device market (as most recent advances in Opera have been made in platform support, interface usability and localization support).

The Register writes too that Opera poised for beta of version 7 heavy duty rewrite. They say that “…Opera Software intends to go to first beta of its new version, Opera 7, soon, with soon probably meaning weeks rather than days or months.” This is a very exciting development, as the Opera browser is now a stable, fast, small, full standard implementation with lots of usability that trumps both Mozilla and IE. (For example, bring up a long article in Opera, hit F11 to go full-screen, then hit keypad+ until the zoom level is good for you.) With full DOM support, there will truly no longer be a reason to keep the other browsers around.