This may come as a shock to many (and it did to me), a new version of Opera for Windows has been released.

The previous version was “Opera 7″ and there was a beta of “7.6″ released, but they are now calling it something else. Personally, I’m going to call it “Opera 8″

Read the press release where they try really hard to avoid calling it Opera 8.

The good news is that those who paid for Opera 7 will get this as a free upgrade.

The bad news is that a lot of the features we were hoping would be in Opera 7 + 1 aren’t yet in this version, most notably (to me) per-site preferences and an improved IMAP client.

While this may come as a surprise, it makes a lot of sense. Several months ago I was thinking about updating the Opera Lover series and realized that there has been a lot of brand new stuff introduced since Opera 7.00.

Opera 7.2 and 7.5 were both major overhauls both internally and with the user interface. And if you don’t think you got enough for your Opera7 dollar, checkout Opera 7 Changelogs for Windows

And then realize that your Opera7 dollar will also get you Opera8, or Opera 7 + 1, or Opera 2005, or whatever they call it when they decide to call it something.

Mac/Linux users (of which I’m one): Voice is Windows only, so it won’t do us any good, and we still have to wait for Opera 7 + 1 to be released for us.

For the official announcement, see Opera Beta release from opera.beta newsgroup.