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Opera 9 with Widgets and BitTorrent Now Available
ZarK writes "Technical Preview 2 of the upcoming Opera 9.0 browser is now available for download. In addition to the general bugfix and rendering improvements there's also new features, like x-platform type widgets, improved content blocking, bittorrent support, thumbnail preview of tabs and more. Improved functionality also comes in the fact that a good lot of the scripts from userscripts.org will now work, advanced settings have improved in opera:config, and more browser customization is available at the opera community. However, some clear indications that this is still an alpha release is the experimental support for NTLM which breaks the proxy functionality for some users, and the fact that widgets are always on top."
I've been using the FreeBSD release today, and my gosh, does it ever fly! It doesn't feel as responsive as Konqueror, but it still is a fantastic browser.
The email client is vastly improved, and it feels much quicker than in previous releases. It was quite quick at listing my 1800 MB mailbox, and it's now possible to scroll through the entries at a rapid pace without delay.
The opera:config feature is quite nice, and presented very well. It's far nicer to view than the comparable about:config capabilities of Firefox, yet just as easy to locate and modify preferences.
Overall, this release is an improvement over the last, while still retaining the small size and high responsiveness that Opera is known for. I give it an A+.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I agree, I've thought for over a year that the first browser to incorporate native BT downloading into itself, so that someone could just click a link and start downloading a torrent without having to download the client/server program first, would make it big on the web very soon.
Now if only websites had a way to offer a BT version of their download files, so that they'll never get Slashdotted again...
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
For the most part if your code is up to standards it looks fine in opera. 90% of the time it renders like Mozilla. Opera is not making the designers job harder. It's closer than most to passing the Acid 2 test.
I'm already trying it out. Full of more great stuff, as one expects. They smoothed out a lot of the features they added in Preview 1 and added so much more.
I heard reports of problems with upgrading so I did a clean install and spent the afternoon adding my custom buttons and changing my search options. (I no longer have to use 3rd party tools to change them)
Between custom buttons, panels, and widgets I think Opera can now easily do anything a Firefox extension can do.
Shick's Law: There is no problem a good miracle can't solve.
Question: why has Opera managed to incorporate Bittorrent support into their browser, yet the only torrent plugins for Firefox are in a horrendous state of pre-development? WTF is going on here?
My own disgust at IE led me to Mozilla years ago. I was reluctant to try Firefox at first, but that switch was pleasant. I never really tried Opera though, until recently.
You see, I'm working on a website that will never be usable in IE. IE is too primitive, and broken. It can't handle xml mime types, and won't even in IE7. It can't do SVG natively, and I don't feel like wrapping all my many SVG widgets in object tags and writing code for a bad Adobe plugin. And besides, people should just plain be discouraged from ever using IE.
SVG though is important to the website, I suppose I could use something gay like flash or java, but I really wanted this to be a pure site. I thought that it would mean that it was Firefox only. Some friends chided me into trying to make it work with Opera and Konq though...
And I was shocked. Opera 8 gets alot of the non-interactive SVG right. Better yet, the Opera 9 beta gets alot of it right, period. And the places where it's screwed up? Bad syntax on my part, that Firefox ignores but that Opera is (rightfully) bitchy about. I won't start using Opera 9, but there's no reason why others shouldn't. It kicks ass.
(And as for Konq, things are looking good. It did the non-interactive SVG really well, and Konqueror 4 looks like it will do just as well as the other two. Still waiting on Safari, but I think it will soon be pretty good itself)
But for IE, we might never need browser specific hackery at all.