Opera 9.50

A couple of minutes back, I downloaded Opera 9.50 and installed on Hardy Heron. The installation was a snap. The new default theme is cool and does not interfere with what you are doing. Opera is touted as the most fastest powerful browser and complies with various web standards completely

This is not a complete review, the only meaningful measurement I was able to take was the memory consumption with three tabs having Twitter time line, WordPress write post page, Gmail open. The memory consumption stood at 59.3 MB. Where as Firfox 3 RC 2 took up 83.2 MB for the same sites open in the same order.

I tried to post this using the new Opera 9.50 but it did not play well with WP. When I pressed enter to insert a new paragraph, the new line was inserted above the current paragraph and was quite a pain to copy and paste in the correct order. I finally posted using Firefox. Not a good sign for Opera. I have not tried a lot of other sites. Twitter did not have any problems though. Gmail too worked but some of the newer features like label colors were not available. This is not a problem with Opera though. I guess that is because they don’t have too much JavaScript on the client side.

Here is screen shot. Click for a larger picture.

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Adobe Buzzword

I have up to Adobe’s new Buzzword – Adobe’s new flash based online word processor and a suite of related applications. It comprises of

• Buzzword – A word processor
• ConnectNow – Free online meeting spaces
• Create PDF – Create up to 5 PDF documents
• Share – A easy way to share files
• MyFiles – An online storage area for files.

On a first look it gave me the impression that it would compete with Google Docs. But it has no spreadsheet or presentation capabilities right now. But the ConnectNow, the online meeting space is a killer feature for people who need to have meetings from different locations. The other applications are rather self explanatory.

Buzzword

Buzzword is flash based and provides a clean interface in black. The toolbars slide on top of each other taking up as little space as possible but requiring more clicks to access a particular feature. All the basic features like text formatting with fonts and colours, paragraph formatting, list and bullets, inserting images, tables, comments, headers and footers, end notes, spell checking, importing documents and versions are supported. The spell checker works in the background and lists the number of wrongly spelled words which can then be corrected.

Documents can be exported as PDF, Word Document in doc, 2003 XML and docx formats, HTML, HTML zipped, RTF, Text formats. No support for ODT format yet. But this available in Google Docs and Zoho Writer. Zoho Writer also allows exporting in formats like LaTex and Star Office SXW format.

Other Applications

I did not try the other applications yet. So once I am done with them I will post. Also I would like to see which among Zoho Writer, Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword has the most and the best features.

Conclusion

Adobe is late to the party and has a lot of catching up to do. But Buzzword is a perfectly usable application. If they continue to improve it by adding additional features it could certainly become a worthy competitor to Google Docs and Zoho Writer

Screenshot