Users reported the download caused the Opera website to go offline for much of Tuesday morning.
“Due to severe strain on our servers we have limited the content on this page to free up more bandwidth while we are working overtime to deal with all the requests,” Opera’s homepage said Tuesday.
In an effort to go head to head with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera claims it has responded to user criticism by offering a cleaner interface, some new rendering tricks and a number of improved security features.
In Opera 8, a security information field automatically starts when a user visits a secure website, indicating the level of security on a scale of one to three and showing who owns the security certificate.
The new version also includes performance improvements, a ramped-up user interface and new voice browsing capabilities, which allow English-speaking users to speak commands to navigate web pages as well as to have content read through text-to-speech technology.
Opera 8, which makes horizontal scrolling obsolete, uses Extensible Rendering Architecture, or ERA, that enables surfers to view pages on any hardware, including mobile devices and televisions.
The browser also has improved RSS handling — including an icon in the address bar of sites that offer feeds for one-step subscriptions — and solves common printing problems by resizing a page to fit the paper’s width.
Opera 8 can be downloaded for free with advertising for the Windows and Linux operating systems. An ad-free version costs $39. Opera also released a beta version for Mac OS computers.
Opera 8 can be downloaded here.
