Opera Software has released Opera 6.0 for Mac Beta 1, the latest version of their Web browser. The update contains interface changes and other tweaks to make Opera look and feel like a proper Mac OS X application, said Dean Kakridas, vice president of desktop products.
With Opera 6.0 for Mac Beta 1 the address entry and search fields are complemented with a zoom bar to increase or decrease the size of the viewing area. The OperaShow feature allows for desktop presentations in full-screen mode. And the long-awaited tabbed browsing mode makes its first appearance for Opera, allowing for multiple windows to be opened within the browser.
A Personal bar has been added to the bookmarks feature to provide quicker access to your most accessed links. Opera 6.0 for Mac Beta 1 also sports “skinning,” which lets you customize the look and feel of the Opera browser. There’s also now inline searching, which purportedly accelerates searching in documents.
Unicode support has been added to support all major non-Latin-derived languages. Language support for Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean is present. Arabic and Hebrew users will be happy to learn that there’s added support for bidirectional (BIDI) languages.
“Great progress is being made to allow Hebrew and Arabic to display correctly,” Kakridas said. “Most pages are already readable and render properly.”
Opera 6.0 for Mac Beta 1 is now available for download. It’s available for free in an ad-sponsored version. If you download it and want to remove the banner ad, you can register it for US$39. However, there is a special 30-day, banner-free trial period. Register now and you’ll get an Opera Power Kit complete with Opera Power CD, Opera Mouse Gestures Pad and Opera sticker, as well as a free upgrade to Opera 7.