http://www.techspot.com/news/21958-oper ... eased.htmlOpera version 9 released
By Justin Mann, TechSpot.com
Published: June 20, 2006
Anyone using the increasingly popular Opera browser will be happy to know that Opera version 9 has just been released and is available for download. As people increasingly move away from Internet Explorer, the majority to Mozilla's FireFox, others have been looking for even yet another alternative. Opera tends to be a quick, feature-rich browser that's definitely worth looking at, and the fact it is cross-platform makes it great for people who don't like to switch standards.
You can get the browser straight from Opera's site. Among a host of fixes, Opera 9 was keen on adding features, which apparently has become the browser's main goal. Integrated bittorrenting was added, which may be useful for those who don't want to install a torrent client, along with a built in anti-phishing toolbar. Improvements to the session storage were added, which is probably the most useful addition of any. It's definitely worth a look if you want to try something new.
For the full article plus user reviews go to:Erik Larkin
Thursday, April 20, 2006
Opera released a version 9 public beta yesterday with a handful of nice new features like widgets and site-specific preferences. Here are my first impressions.
You can't help but notice the new widget (little mini-programs to do a variety of tasks) support right away. When you fire up the beta, a little white button called "Opera Widgets" tucks up along the top border of your screen. The display gets a dark overlay when you click the button, and you can add widgets.
I grabbed some of the little applets for displaying the weather and a little Pandora interface. You can "pin" them so they show up in your normal display. Otherwise you can hit a hotkey (F6) to switch to the widget display.
One drawback to using widgets (which have been around for a good while) this way is that when you close Opera, your widgets go away also. If you're into the little guys, you might be better off getting a standalone program like Yahoo's.
Like widgets, site-specific preferences was a still-to-come feature when I looked at the last Opera 9 preview for our January issue. It's a great customization option that can make for safer browsing to boot.
Right-click any given page and choose "Edit site preferences," and you'll see a range of options for handling pop-ups, cookies, and scripting. Any changes you make apply only to that site.
This is a nice route to safer browsing. You can set your global preferences to a high level of security by turning off cookies, javascript, java, etc., and then enable them on a site-by-site basis.
The new "Block content" feature is useful and easy to use. You can click displayed images in a page and block them based on source Web address.
A little aside here: if you're a Firefox user, these site-preferences and content blocking features probably sound familiar to the popular NoScript and AdBlock add-ons. And they are, although Opera's site-specific preferences lets you change a whole lot more than just javascript preferences. This continues the back-and-forth I love to see between Firefox and Opera, where advances in one seem to drive additional development in the other. I'm not privy to Opera's dev team, so I really can't say whether they were inspired by Firefox plugins. But I do know many available Firefox addons describe themselves as reproducing Opera-like behavior.
It's a scenario where everybody wins - and where the bar for IE 7, whenever it's finally released, is bumping up higher and higher.
Back to Opera: other new features include built-in Bittorrent support, improved pop-up blocking, and thumbnail pop-ups when you mouseover a tab. I suppose the thumbnails could be useful if you've got a mess of tabs open, but I have to say I prefer getting a preview page of open tabs. IE 7 will have that built-in, and there are a number of Firefox plugins for it.
http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/001892.html
To download Opera Web Browser:
http://www.opera.com/download/
