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Tuesday 19th April 2005

Opera taking orders for new browser 1:02PM, Tuesday 19th April 2005

Opera Software has released a major revision of its eponymous browser. New features within Opera 8, for Windows and Linux, include voice interaction capabilities and anti-phishing options, which help indicate the trustworthiness of banking and shopping Web sites.

'With 10 years of listening to the needs of Internet users, we believe we have released a product that sets a new standard for Web browsing,' declared Jon S. von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera Software.

As well as support for navigating the Web with voice commands - through HTML+Voice with the IBM WebSphere Multimodal Environment - Opera 8 includes a faster rendering engine for displaying Web pages quicker, support for Scalable Vector Graphics 1.1 for richer XML-based multimedia content, and a simplified interface.

And in this age of



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phishing attacks - where spoof websites seek to dupe users into parting with financial information - there is also a new security information field to help provide safer surfing. This is automatically activated when you visit a secure Web site and indicates the level of security (on a scale of 1-3) and the certificate owner of the site. The idea is to allows users to better evaluate a site's trustworthiness and sidestep potential online frauds.

'The vast majority of Internet users have had to deal with a slow and insecure browser for too long,' declared Opera Software CTO, Håkon Wium Lie. 'People are spending more time online, and with the increase in online fraud it is vital that they have a browser that is fast, secure and easy to use. That's what we offer with Opera 8.'

Opera 8 can be downloaded from www.opera.com/download. As always, it is freely available, but users must pay $39 to remove the advertising banner at the top of the browser.

The company states that 'nearly one million' users have downloaded the beta versions of the release.

Alun Williams

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