5 features and more to look for in Opera 9.5

Posted on June 19, 2008 at 5:30 am

June 2008 seems to have been all about browsers.

The market is dominated by 4 main competitors; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari. The remainder is made up of modified browsers built on top of these and include Flock, Maxthon and Songbird.

It’s been a little competitive recently with Mozilla and Opera launching increasingly frequent beta versions then multiple Refresh Candidates (RC) over the last month.

Opera finally pushed the completed 9.5 version and Mozilla announced the 17th as the official release date.

I was never a huge Opera user although I did load it up on occasion, however with the 9.5 release I have found myself increasingly using it up over Flock, my main browser of choice.

Opera has always struggled to hold its market share even after after introducing some remarkable innovations including tabbed browsing which transformed online browsing. Unfortunately for too long Opera was only available for free with banner-advertisements and discouraged many potential users.

A couple of years ago they got rid of this model and instead settled on a similar

It would seem Opera’s strength has always been in providing innovative yet simple features and focusing on just what the average end user needs from a modern browser; speed, performance and stability.

Performance

Version 9.5 brings improvements to almost all the existing features, incorporates several more and introduces a whole new Interface. Overall performance is great, even though Mozilla is proclaiming Firefox 3 is the fastest browser now, Opera overall feels more responsive.

Here are the results from The Last Podcast’s tests:

Firefox
2463.4ms

Safari 4
2337.4ms

Opera
3405.4ms

We can see the differences are in the fractions of a second and with increasingly faster connection speeds and more powerful systems these speed improvements are becoming increasingly hard to notice for the average user.

Lifehacker found Opera to be the fastest first-time loading browser,

User Interface

I think the new UI has been very well designed; different enough to be fresh yet still retaining enough of the previous theme to not alienate users or reduce usability. In fact if you really don’t like it the classic theme is available to download.

A great addition is the ‘tab bin’ now on the right end of the tab bar, clicking it brings up a menu of recently closed tabs which is great. It can be very frustrating accidentally closing a tab then having to look through your history to find out what exactly it was.

If you can get used to them Fast Forward and Rewind buttons are useful as well. Rather then rapidly clicking 50 times to get to previous pages you can simply use fast rewind to jump more then 1 page, although I did find it a little slow.

The only complaint I would have is that the tab background can be a little dark and its easy to lose the tabs visually along the bar.

Features

Sure you can get these with Firefox, but while extensions are one of Firefox’s greatest strengths they’re also its weakness. Badly written extensions can cause performance, security and stability problems.

Opera provides a lot of these features built right into the browser, in fact there’s so many features it’s quite hard to choose just 5 to look out for in this list.

1) Speed Dial

The amazingly simple but brilliant Speed Dial has had a couple of minor improvements including the option option of selecting an already open tab or page from your history when you choose a new speed dial page.

I find Speed Dial is the most useful feature Opera for me, even if it’s also one of the most basic.

2) Mouse gestures

I really have to get myself into the habit of using these as they are so handy. Unfortunately when you’ve spent your whole life navigating another way it’s hard to change habit.

Some of the mouse navigation include going to the previous page by holding the right mouse button down and clicking the left button, to go forward the opposite applies.

3) Synchronisation

Opera has a mere 2-4% of the desktop browser market but has been focusing on making greater gains in other browsing markets, although I don’t have figures to give an indication of progress at this point.

Opera 9.5 brings a tighter integration of various Opera services and browsers by syncing bookmarks, settings and personal data between devices. This includes multiple desktops, (work and home for example) mobile devices (Opera Mobile and Mini) and Macs.

4) Mail

Email has really been vamped up for 9.5, in fact it’s now a viable replacement of a desktop client and can now be set as such from the Windows default programs options.

If you’re not keen on downloading all your emails through POP access then Opera Mail is a great way to browse and organise your emails over the web through a desktop like interface. If Gmail is your main client then you may find Opera particularly useful.

As well as this there’s basic chat support included, and a contact directory to store and maintain details.

These features run from the sidebar along with Widgets, bookmarks, downloads and other functions.

5) Fit to Width

Ever been annoyed at badly written pages which are far too wide and need sideways scrolling to fit the browser window? Well Opera has this minor yet very cool little feature which attempts to fit all pages into the browser windows. Sometimes it won’t work quite right, but I can live with that.

That’s not all you can expect from Opera 9.5, be sure to check out the integrated bit-torrent client, Widgets (all right, those are pretty rubbish), notes, RSS reader and the Wand password tool.

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Comments

3 Responses to “5 features and more to look for in Opera 9.5”

Haris said on : June 19th, 2008 at 5:26 pm

My favourite feature in Opera is the Speed Dial.

akishore said on : June 19th, 2008 at 6:01 pm

Haris, that’s my fav too! I now have like 4 different browsers installed on my system! IE, Firefox, Opera, and Flock and I use them all! hahahah

Pallab said on : June 20th, 2008 at 11:46 pm

Opera is my default browser since v7.11 (and that was released ages ago).