Opera 10

[CarlSeibert]

is out. I have it installed on this Mac laptop and my main Linux desktop.

It seems faster, appears to use less memory and is more spritely all around. Plugins seem to work better on the Linux version.

I haven't tried the proxy server feature. I'm happy to see that they've added a spell checker that works in vBulletin forms, like FireFox has had forever. I like that Speed Dial is now expandable to more than nine items and that I don't have to hold the mouse button down on menus on the Mandriva machine like it was an ancient Mac. (It's the little things that make me happy.) All the features that made me like the browser in the first place are still present and accounted for and working, as best I can tell.

On the other hand, the RPM version(s) didn't work on my Mandriva 2007 system. I had to root around to find a static-linked bundled version in a tarball. Grrrrr. Somehow, as I get older I am beginning to expect software to actually work and I have less of a sense of humor about crap like that.

I'd love to report that Operalink works better in the new version, but sadly, it still fails to sync and hoses the application if you try. On the Mac, it threw the browser into some sort of loop and I had to start with a clean profile to get Opera to even start after trying it. On the Linux box, it just ground away for a a while and failed reasonably gracefully. More or less. I suspect the failure of Operalink is really on the server side. It's frustrating because synchronization would be such a great feature if they would just put forth the effort to freakin' make it work!