Atomic Playboy

One word review: “Wow!”

When I switched from Opera 6 to Mozilla, I thought I had found my weapon of choice when it came to web browsers. I knew that Opera 7 would have lots of new stuff, but I decided to stick with Mozilla anyway. But now I’m starting to have second thoughts.

Opera 7 is slick. The new GUI is sweet to look at. It may be considered unnecessary bells and whistles, but I really like it. One feature alone really sold me on Opera: <rel> navigation.

Consider this image. See that blue bar below the address bar? That’s the navigation bar, that gets populated with links from the currently browsed document. See how some of them are disabled? That’s because they aren’t defined in the document.

I added relevant (no pun intended) <rel> tags to most of my site, and it is used in the example image. Individual entries have navigation links to the next and previous entry, and the “up” button takes you to the calendar view for that month. “Index” gives you the trashcan, “Copyright” displays the Creative Commons license, and “Author” gives you the currently non-existing page about me.

But that was just the pure graphical side of Opera 7. I haven’t had a look under the hood yet, but I’m sure there’s nothing but good stuff there. I’ll stick with Opera 7 for a while and take it for a ride.

Update: Added “Search.” It still uses the default MT template and is thus ugly as hell at the moment. This is currently the only way to access the search function. Threaten me with sharp, pointy implements of destruction if you want it available in the sidebar.