Opera 9 Released!
June 20, 2006
Today marks the release of the much anticipated Opera version 9 which for the past few months has been in public beta. A plethora of new features have been added some of them quite interesting) but for me it seems to be more about the refinement of some features that weren’t quite polished enough in the 8.5 release.
New Features
BitTorrent Support – Now you can download torrents right from within your browser
Content Blocker – Remove ads or images – it’s up to you
Thumbnail Preview – It is easy to have many tabs open at once in Opera. But exactly which tab had that video you wanted? Hover your mouse on any tab to see a thumbnail preview.
Widgets – Think dashboard, but just for your browser…
Rich Text Editing – now much improved
Thoughts
The most notable feature I think is the support for download torrents right inside your browser, this has progressively gotten better throughout the beta versions but it still seems a tad slow when compared to a proper client such as Azureus or ųTorrent. However for users who seldom download torrents it’s perfectly capable and makes the whole process of downloading them a lot more transparent to the user.
Improved standards support definitely makes life a lot easier for web designers and all of the sites I used to visit that didn’t get on well with Opera now work flawlessly which is great news.
Widgets are the only thing that seem sort of… unnecessary to me. While I find widgets are quite useful they aren’t a function I feel should really be tied to a browser as a consider widgets to be more a part of the core system than an application. Although that could just be my experience with dashboard in OS X 10.4 talking.
I can’t really finish this entry without also mentioning the performance. Absolutely blistering and even faster than an optimised Firefox on my Windows machine. The cache is also much better as it used to have a habit of not wanting to load new content on some dynamic sites so it’s great to see this has now been rectified. One thing I can recommend to get a bit of extra umph out of Opera (if you’re on broadband) is to type opera:config into your address bar and then edit the following settings (you can also do this in the preferences menu I believe):
max connections server: 32
max connections total: 64Overall though it’s a great new release and serves to cement it’s place as my primary browser on my Windows machine. Sadly the interface just doesn’t feel quite right on the Macintosh yet but I’m sure it’s something that will be looked at in the future. Whether you’re still on IE or even a hard core Firefox user Opera is well worth a look, it might just surprise you!
Feedback?
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