Opera 9 Final has been released yesterday with a horde of interesting new features and improvements.

The highlights of this version – tagged build 8501 – are, by far, Bittorent support, the powerful and interactive content blocker and the widget engine, all explained in more detail below.

The installer is quite polished, with an optimistic feeling to it, and, in case you have an older version of Opera installed, offers the option of installing 9.0 as an upgrade or as a separate program, a helpful option if you want to keep both versions available to make the transition somewhat smoother.

A very interesting addition is the tab preview, which basically displays a thumbnail of a tab’s contents along with a couple of other bits of information when the tab is hovered with the mouse.

The Bittorent support in Opera 9 eliminates the need for a standalone Bittorent client. Bittorent links are picked up on the fly by the browser. However, some users may still prefer to stick to traditional programs such as uTorrent and Azureus for this task. (Traditional AND memory-hungry in Azureus’ case.)

The content blocker is a sneaky and powerful sidekick on your web endeavors. It allows per-URL content blocking and takes care of useless images and annoying Flash animations – for good. Just right click on the page, read the short instructions and click/shift-click the baddies. They’ll never work in your town again.

Widgets are more and more becoming a thing users fear is going to be implemented in their favorite application. Why feared? Well, mostly because the ability of having tremendous fun playing Tetris or Snake from within your email reader or web browser is going to bring some overhead into the software as well. Yes, you’re going to have the time of your life feeding that little worm his favorite snack (black square dots), but if the software gains crashing and memory leaking super-powers in the process you might want to reconsider.

Opera is yet another victim of the widget-trend and includes some default little applications such as news readers, clocks and mini-games, nothing out of the ordinary. There is a game though, Circular Tetris, that kept me busy for about 3 minutes, so I guess that’s cool.

Voice support transforms Opera into an obedient servant, but only after you install a fatty 11MB plugin. Once you do so, you get to verbally command your brand new virtual Lurch to reload pages or even read up texts.

There’s a lot more to be said about Opera 9 so, even if I’m going to wrap this up now, you should expect a full-blown, hands-on, widget-thrashing, content-blocking, torrent-downloading crocodile-wrestling review sometime soon.

*** RELEVANT LINKS ***

Download Opera 9 for Windows (.exe installer, 4.6MB)
Download Opera 9 for Linux i386 (various distro packages)
Download Opera 9 for Mac OS (.dmg, 13MB)
Download Opera 9 for other platforms

Tags: browsers, opera |

This entry was posted on Friday, June 23rd, 2006 at 12:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.