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Opera 9 public beta with widgets and BitTorrent support

by Jan Kabili Apr 21st 2006 at 7:00AM

A public beta of Opera 9 was announced yesterday. I'm not an Opera user myself, but the download is free, so I took a very quick look at some of the new features:
  • Widgets. Opera 9 has its own widgets -- clocks, games, and other small AJAX apps. Of course, Mac users have plenty of widgets anyway, so this feature may not be much of a draw for us. You can download currently available Opera widgets, learn how to develop your own Opera widgets, and share any you create at the Opera Community site. There are a reasonable number of widgets there already, and the list is bound to grow.
  • BitTorrent Support. I didn't try this out, but it sounds very tempting. Opera 9 has built-in support for the BitTorrent protocol, so you can download large files directly through Opera without having to use a separate BitTorrent app.
  • Content blocker. The Opera 9 content blocker lets you choose the kind of content, from ads to images, that you want to block on a particular site.
  • Custom search engine. You can customize the Opera search box to use the search engine from any site.
  • Thumbnail previews of tabbed pages. Opera has had tabbed browsing for a while now. There are some nice enhancements to tabbed browsing in Opera 9. Hovering over a tab triggers a thumbnail image of the page that's open in that tab. This is really useful when you have lots of tabs open and you can't remember what's open in each. Another new feature is the ability to lock an open tab so you don't close it accidentally.
  • Site-specific preferences. These come in handy to block pop-ups or deny cookies on a particular site.
Opera 9 has lots of other improvements. For the complete list of goodies check out the change log for Opera 9.0 Beta 1 for Mac.

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A public beta of Opera 9 was announced yesterday. I'm not an Opera user myself, but the download is free, so I took a very quick look at...
 

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jeff

IE7 has a thumbnail view of tabs, it's something that I find myself using a lot more than I would have expected. Firefox and Camino should add this feature.

April 23 2006 at 10:59 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
tush

I really like opera, since the beginning. I do agree with Adrian, Opera is kinda slow compared to camino/safari on my 1.5ghz pbook. On windows though, it flies!

Hopefully opera 9 will run a little smoother on my computer.

April 21 2006 at 11:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Stephen Waits

@Adrian vG

Be careful, your ignorance is showing...

http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

--Steve

April 21 2006 at 10:49 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
SuitCase

Hey, awesome! I'm glad TUAW reported on this. Opera 9 is a great brower, and is a lot better for the Mac than you would probably remember it being. I'm one of its evangelists. :|

Basically, it's fast, very powerful (a lot more than Omniweb), full of extra non-browser functionality and it has a mediocre UI for a Mac program. It's kinda like Firefox, except it's actually better in some ways than Safari.

I suggest anyone who's open to something different try the Opera 9 beta (the Mac beta versions tend to be faster and more stable than the final versions, due to the rapid improvement of code) and visit my website here to get things working extra well: http://www.soaringrabbit.com/misc/opera_setup.html

It's still a little slow to load, but the UI and rendering engine are very fast and efficient. It was also the first universal binary browser to be released for the Mac. Plus Opera recently added support for the Apple remote - try putting Opera in full screen mode and trying it out!

April 21 2006 at 10:27 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Adrian vG

But it is so slooow compared to Safari, Camino, Firefox...

April 21 2006 at 8:39 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Blah

I downloaded and tried it yesterday, and it ran fairly nice. I coudn't get the content blocker to work or even find it's settings, and I don't like how Opera has ever handled it's bookmarks, but I might give it a whirl this weekend to see how it compares.

April 21 2006 at 7:53 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Antoine Quint

Let's not forget also its stellar support for SVG, the best of any browser...

April 21 2006 at 7:33 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
iamdigitalman (Leo LeBron V)

cool. does it work with OS 9? because the current version doesnt, and that just pisses me off.

April 21 2006 at 7:11 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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