30 Days to becoming an Opera8 Lover

On July 07, 2005 at 08:14 AM, Iain wrote:

Can someone explain to a non-computer scientist what the difference is between a 'Technology Preview' and a beta version? Is TP just a fancier way of saying 'here is a beta of Opera 8.02'?

On July 07, 2005 at 11:16 AM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

Iain

Simply put, "Technology Previews" tend to be near-beta quality/stability, but may introduce a new feature (such as Bittorrent) which is meant to be tested only by more hard-core, geekier, bleeding edge folks.

IMO this has happened because the meaning of "beta" has been greatly diluted in recent years to mean "Almost the same as a release version." I mean, GMail has been in beta for how long? How long was Firefox "beta"?

I always always always recommend a clean install fot TPs (i.e. do not install a TP over your current installation).

I actually recommend that for every release, but I think it is much more important for TPs than for others.

On July 08, 2005 at 10:06 AM, Andrew D wrote:

My understanding of the difference between a beta and a technology preview is this;

A beta is a near or fully feature complete version of a product that is just in testing.

A technology preview is a non-feature complete version created specifically to... preview a technology. Hence this version has Bittorrent downloading built in but no UI for it (by way of example/illustration).

The technology is there but the implementation isn't complete.

On July 15, 2005 at 01:38 PM, Martin wrote:

Open edonkey links with opera will be great too

On July 24, 2005 at 03:50 PM, pEeDy wrote:

@Martin:

You can actually do this in Opera. When you click the ed2k link it'll just open eDonkey/eMule/whatever for you!

You just need to do this: Go to Preferences, Advanced, Programs and click Add. Then type in 'ed2k', choose your application and click OK! It's as simple as that :)

On August 03, 2005 at 08:26 AM, Jerry Tobias wrote:

Can someone please tell me what Opera 8.02 adds to the previous version? I could not find what this upgrade does.

I wish the Opera site would explain what the upgrade accomplishes.

{{TjL writes: Jerry, they do, although it isn't always easy to find if you use Opera's website search. If you search your favorite search engine for "opera 8.02 changelog" you will find what you are looking for. In this case it can be found here: http://www.opera.com/windows/changelogs/802/.}}

On August 03, 2005 at 10:48 AM, TjL (tntluoma.com) wrote:

Two further notes:

All changelogs can be found here:

http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/index.dml

8.02 "Final" did not include BitTorrent (it was mostly a security update) but 8.10 Preview does http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w810p2.html

On September 20, 2005 at 09:38 PM, Eric Blade wrote:

And of course now there's 8.50, which also does not have bittorrent. :) but that's ok, I think. I do have a couple of torrents still in the transfer window from 8.10, and clicking "Resume" on them does nothing, but they have the indicators that they are torrents. So, it's not something that's going away. (I found that as much as I ignored the two lines of google ads for the last year or so, having them NOT on the screen is so much of a joy I don't need torrent support...)