Opera just released a snapshot today of version 9.6 with several new features.
For now I will just be talking about the Feed preview feature that they just included. I have been asking for this for a while now since Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari already support this (maybe others as well).
With the preview feature, it’s very easy to look over a feed and decide if the content is worthy of your subscription. Previously in Opera, clicking a feed icon meant that you had to immediately decide if you wanted the feed or not.
You could of course remove the feed later upon realizing it’s not worth following, but it was just extra steps that shouldn’t be there. Now the feeds are not mixed with your other subscriptions unless you decide to add a feed after previewing it.
The design seems to always be generated by Opera on the client side just to add a style that you can easily recognize and get a quick overview. The theme or design that they use is very clean and simple.
They also insert a little badge of honor at the bottom of the page to let you know that Opera generated the preview for you and they even inform you of the address to the feed!
Over all I’m pleased with this addition, however, I do feel that it took far to long to implement.
It’s a little sad sometimes to see our stagnant friend Internet Explorer a head of Opera sometimes in various aspects and implementations. For the most part Opera is usually a head, but at the same time they try to get a feel for things long before they decide to implement them to make sure they are promising…which is a good move, but frustrating sometimes to the end users who are expecting a feature for so long.
EDIT:
Here is a screenshot comparing the same Feed Preview across Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox respectively. Opera takes the cake on simplicity. 😀
If you can take a screenshot of a kyleabaker.com Feed Preview in any other browsers that I didn’t have access to while taking the ones above then please take them and upload them to ImageShack or something and post a link!
