Its the best. It still has a little issue with Meta-referrer tags wich is a bit annoying with the redirect pages on this forum, but it beats anything else around.
Never heard of it. I only know 7498. I would stick with your version unless you want to check out the changes in Beta3. Some major changes BTW. But Beta3 still has some missing things. Read this: http://nontroppo.org/wiki/Opera8/show?time=2005-03-15+22:13:31