Slashdot Mirror
Opera 9.0 Released
Nurgled writes "After teasing us for months with betas and snapshots, Opera Software have finally released version 9.0 of their web browser. The new version features correct ACID2 rendering, native support for the SVG Basic profile, a built-in BitTorrent client, support for Microsoft's designmode and contenteditable extensions, per-site configuration, Atom support, Web Forms 2.0 support, Canvas support (and some Opera-specific extensions), NTLM authentication, some support of parts of CSS3 and lots more. The full changelog is available."
p14nd4 adds "And for you *nix users, it hasn't hit their .deb repository quite yet, but there are regular installers available for the major players, including a fixed Ubuntu installer and an x86 Solaris version."
The main Opera.exe plus the Opera.dll that contains all the fun stuff still only adds up to a paltry 3.12MB (Windows version, obviously) even with all this stuff. It might be experiencing a bit of creeping featurism, but it doesn't seem to be suffering for it. I've noticed no speed decrease from Opera 8.51.
I'm actually quite pleased with the BitTorrent support; There have been many occasions when I've gone to download something and a site has offered both BitTorrent and a normal HTTP download, and I've picked HTTP just because it saves me launching some other app. Obviously the prolific downloaders aren't going to use it in preference to Azureus or uTorrent, but I expect it'd come in handy for more casual users and is also a good first step to greater adoption of BitTorrent.
Obviously you haven't used Opera9 at all. The BT client in Opera9 works similar to regular downloads and so does indeed show transfer rates and the number of seeds/peers. In addition to that when you download the torrent file it will allow you to limit your upload and download speed. It also shows the amount of data uploaded/downloaded and the number of current connections going out/in.
It supports netscape plugin API, and Widgets, is that enough entensions for you?
Have you ever used Opera? There is quick & easy to use ad-blocking capabilities built-in ... It's under Tools->Options ... and there are like 4 stages ... ranging from Allow-All to Block-All
Opera does have extensions. They call it User JS.
Here is a good repository: http://userjs.org/
I totally agree about the responsiveness and how snappy Opera is versus firefox, that was what initially got me using Opera a few years ago over Moz. It is my main browser as well on Windows. I have noticed that on some websites Opera does seem to have run away memory issues where I have to close it using task manager, it does not happen very often but it does occur. I have also noticed that if I leave msdn.com open in a tab that there seems to be a memory leak and I need to close and restart Opera to get the memory back as just closing the tab does not seem to work. When this last issue occurs the mem usage goes to 100MB+, it is quite annoying. Overall I am a happy Opera user, I don't need all of the extensions available to firefox as Opera has everything I currently need.
Hey, there is only one Return and it's not of the King, it's of the Jedi.
If you like Firefox because of the the web developer toolbar, then you may be interested in the Opera W3-Dev Menu: http://tobyinkster.co.uk/opera