Its finally here! Go download and give it a whirl. I'm downloading from the US web site and its coming down at 9 kb/sec which is a good order of magnitude slower than my web connection. So a lot of people are going after it at the moment.

From the Opera News page here are a few of the improvements:

The standards support in Opera 7 for Windows Beta 1 has been improved with added support for DOM level 2 and CSS2; improved ECMAScript and HTML 4.01 support; and complete WML 1.3 and 2.0 support. Opera 7 also handles non-standard pages using DHTML, giving Opera's millions of old and new users a hassle-free Internet experience.

Also, Opera has released a version of their browser for FreeBSD.

I'll come back and update this post once I have some experience using it.

Update: Its fast, small, and pretty. I've taken it to perhaps 100 pages so far with no crashes or rendering problems. It has a new email client that sounds interesting. All email from all accounts are accessible via a single database structure that can sort and search on any number of characteristics (eg like who it is from). One problem I see with it is that while it has a spam filter there is just 3 levels of filtering and so far I haven't found anything about user-programmable spam filters.