Blog . Jiboneus

Opera released a technology preview of Opera 9, codenamed Merlin. I download and try out the Mac version. The new Opera 9.0 preview version contains features such as :-

Opera widgets - Similar to OSX’s Dashboard and Yahoo!’s widgets but build on Opera. The widgets are suppose to support the browser, but I still don’t see the point. May be as a browser plug in, for example a del.icio.us widgets that I could drag and drop Website for bookmarking. I haven’t find any usefull widgets other at My Opera Community.

BitTorrent download - Instead of downloading the torrent file and fire up your BitTorrent client to start the download, Opera could start downloading right away. That is of cause if it works. This doesn’t work when I tried it. It might be the BitTorrent preferences, but I’m too lazy to check on it right now. Anyhow, I wish other browser would do this too. This way BitTorrent will become more mainstream.

Thumbnail preview – Mouse over on your tabs and you will get a preview of the Webpage.

Other new add feature are :-

• Customize your search engines
• Improve content blocker
• Improve pop-up blocke
• Site specific preferences

My experience using it, Opera feels like it render fast, but I stumble on certain site that doesn’t render that well on Opera but render well on FireFox and Safari. Since this is a “Technology Preview� therefore there are bound to have bugs here an there. Only use this if you wan to test it and look at what’s new, don’t rely on this as your main browser.

The thing that keeps me using FireFox is the tons of plug-in support. May be Opera would do better with the widgets approach?

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