A Swedish wolf in Norway

As seen in the latest weekly builds of Opera 9.0, we are working on an international installer for Windows. Like Mac already had for Opera 8, we are creating a Windows installer that contains (almost) all the languages we have translations in. Doing this avoids having a specific installer for each language, which makes selecting the file to download difficult.

Several of the international versions have traditionally had some special settings shipped with their installer, for example the Japanese version would set Japanese fonts as default, and set the character encoding settings to Japanese, and all the translated versions would set the web page language setting appropriately. To avoid having to have several special cases in the installer, and having to duplicate this for all the platforms we release on, these default value for these settings are now set according to your settings.

This means that whatever language you have set in the Control Panel (Windows), System preferences (Mac) or through environment variables like LANG (Unix) will now be used to determine the web page language setting (Mac already did this in Opera 8). That setting will also decide whether to use any locale-specific character encoding setting, like enabling Asian auto-detection or setting the fallback encoding. On a Mac, changing the system language will even make Opera change its menu language (requires restart)!

We hope that this will make the international Opera experience a better one. Enjoy!