While Microsoft Corp and Netscape Communications Corp are busy slugging it out in the courts, privately-owned Opera Software AS has released version 3.0 of its Opera browser which it boasts is faster, more user friendly and requires a fraction of the memory of rival offerings.The Kjeller, Norway based company immodestly describes its offering as the most amazing software product in its category claiming the browser takes up just under 2Mb of memory and will run on anything upwards of a 386SX machine with 4MB of RAM. Key features include one-button scaling of web pages from 20% to 1,000% and the ability to browse in multiple windows, enabling users to retrieve multiple documents and images simultaneously.The company is also pushing a full keyboard interface, claiming the ability to navigate entirely by keyboard is of particular interest to the disabled. Opera uses 128-bit encryption and also supports the Secure Sockets Layer version 2 and 3 as well as support for JavaScript. A spokesperson for the privately held company claims several thousand hits on its web site every day and that up until two months ago around 2% of all hits came from Microsoft Corp employees. Head of sales and marketing Sandra Thorbjornsen said there are no immediate plans for an Initial Public Offering but claims to have had hundreds of emails from potential investors. The eleven-person firm was formed in 1995 by Geir Ivarsoy and Jon vonTetzchner as a spin-off from Norwegian telecommunication company, Telenor. Opera can be downloaded at http://www.operasoftware.com/register.html and is available in a 90-day shareware version. Languages supported include English, Norwegian, Swedish, German and Spanish with plans for Italian,Afrikaans and French versions.Opera costs $35 per license and is up on DOS 5.0, Windows 3.1x, Windows 95,Windows NT3.51 and OS/2. The company added that it’s working on cascading style sheets and Java support for the 4.0 release, currently due in the second quarter 1998.
