Interesting. I am not sure I care for the "speed dial". Everything else was nothing new - so I deinstalled it.

I use Opera way too much to play with betas most of the time. I'll probably wait for the release on this one.

SpeedDial looks kind of handy from the screen-shots. What didn't you like about it?

> What didn't you like about it?

I use "double click on background" (with no open tabs) to open my local start page five hundred to a thousand times a day. That is now gone and is the speed dial location.

I also wonder how much spidering is going on in the background to produce those up-to-date thumbnails for it?

They got rid of "double click on background"? I use that constantly as well. Maybe they'll reconsider. That's too handy a feature to let go for a thumbnail page.

Double-click on the speed dial background works fine. Double-click with no tabs is not working and it used to work? Please report that bug at [bugs.opera.com...] then.

The thumbnails are updated when you either go to a page from speed dial, or manually select Reload on specific thumbnail or the whole speed dial page. In other cases, they are cached.

Thanks Mitchman.

bt

Ok, I was a bit short with the install before, but I will do it again and take some notes as I go.

Opera Install Notes:

Install did ask me if I wanted to upgrade, but did not ask where Opera was located at on disk. I doubt it found my actual copy of opera to upgrade since it is not in /program files, so I bet I get to reinstall this puppy again. Yep, upgraded some old copy (v8?) parked in the old location that I haven't used since it was installed.
Back up - uninstall opera, and nuke the old directory.

(note, things like this are common when installing Opera - always make a copy of your Opera directory before installing)

Did you guys walk on my search.ini again? Thats not just annoying - it's rude to downright arogant. Thank goodness I made that back up copy of Opera. I spent several hours coming up with the 'perfect' search.ini. How many other things did Opera just walk on?

I start and control-w to close all windows. Hey, empty background - double click and no home page. I get the speed dial page. A quick check of prefs and I don't see a spot to turn that speed dial stuff off. Ok, I did just find the "hide speed dial" link (forgot that was there from the weeklies). Cool, but I sure don't get speed dial. Doesn't seem like a feature people would want, but it is a nifty programming hack. How is it faster at all than a personal bar? I use a personal bar and the links there are my 'speed dial'. I guess being on such a high speed network at the office means I rarely wait too much for a page to load. With Opera anal retentive to the standard "non caching" behavior (worse than IE or Firefox), I don't see how clicking on a thumbnail would be faster or more accurate than just visiting a link.

Lets check my current "stopper bug" that causes me serious opera pain. The meta refresh handling behavior. Yep, still handled the same way. On a meta refresh, there is no way to go back over a brief refresh - so the back button gets broken. Such as leaving a post here with your control panel prefs set to a zero second refresh after posting. (I'll reset your's to zero Mitchman - give it a try)...

Opera has a lot going for it, but I hate to say, my slow march towards using FF on a regular basis continues. Sad after this many years, but Opera is more interested in appeasing the w3c than it's users. Ya, it is a delicate balance I know, but FF is going the other way and coming up with stuff that suits users first and the w3 second. Page usability first - everything else will follow.