Opera Software, today announced the release of Opera 8 for Macintosh, available for Mac OS X versions 10.2 and higher.

Opera 8 for Macintosh includes the same functionality as Opera 8 for Windows and Linux, which was released April 19, 2005. Opera 8 introduced security solutions, such as the new security field that indicates the level of security and the certificate-owner of a secure site. Native Scalable Vector Graphic support (SVG 1.1 Tiny), introduced in Opera 8, is also included in the Macintosh version. Other features offered in Opera 8 include a 'delete private data' option, a 'trash can' that saves closed pages and blocked pop-ups during a session, and Opera's Extensible Rendering Architecture (ERA) which automatically re-adjusts page content to fit the window width.

The browser has improved its support for Apple's Human Interface Guidelines and added Full Keyboard Access functionality. Opera 8 for Macintosh is available for download in Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.

"With Opera, Mac users can surf fast, comfortably and efficiently using a full-featured browser that is not tied to the operating system (OS)," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software. "Rather than incurring costly upgrades to your OS to get the newest features, Opera allows Mac users to browse, e-mail, download and chat using one program, requiring minimal system resources due to Opera's small size."