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."

Comments

Re:Little benefit to Firefox these days.

[MikeFM]

If Opera 9 has decent CSS support I might agree. Opera 8's CSS support was pretty crappy. Not compatible with Firefox and Safari or IE which just sort of left it as a thorn in my side that wasn't really worth the effort of fixing. Never have figured out if there is a hack around Opera responds to for selecting an Opera only stylesheet. Anyone know?

Re:A darn good job.

[MikeFM]

By cutting corners I'd guess. They don't render pages all that well. If you don't follow spec then it's not that hard to go faster.

Not that it's not some good programming involved too.. probably they do have an impressive parser and rendering engine speed-wise. Just pointing out one obvious way they get some of that speed.

Re:A browser with native BitTorrent

[Thrakkerzog]

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...

Wow! Flash and Java have a sexual preference? Or do you simply mean that they are happy? (I hear that Java will get it on with Windows, Linux, BSD and Macintosh! Oh Baby! Java even goes for those 64 bit hotties.)

Re:Bittorrent and Firefox

[cyberdemo]

If you won't get off your own ass and actually help, please shut up. Firefox is free software, and free software is primarily driven by the needs of those who write it. If you think the state of things in that area is poor and feel that that is not changing any time soon, then go hack on it yourself.

lame gimmick

[drew]

Is it just me, or are the Opera widgets just a lame gimmick? They don't seem to offer any benefit over the multiple other widget packages out there (konfabulator, dashboard, etc.) and they don't stay open when you close your browser. So why would I want to use these as opposed to some other widget implementation that runs independently of my browser? If they would separate them out, for example, so that they used all of the Opera rendering libraries but ran in a separate process (that could be set to start automatically at login) I think it might be a really neat idea, but from what information they have available on the site, they look pretty lame.