centre{source}

Well, the second technology of Opera 9.0 has been released. I figured I would reserve commentary this time until I had actually used it for a while, since I figured the second pre-release would be a bit more stable than the first, which crashed often. Thankfully, I was right, and I’ve been using Opera 9 for almost a month now.

Frankly, I couldn’t be happier. The only issue I’ve run into is a small one (which I’ll cover with a tip on how to workaround in a subsequent post). Everything else I have to talk about so far is an improvement:

First, they’ve improved the management of per-site preferences extensive. You can now change settings on a per-site basis for pretty much everything you can imagine, including cookies/popups, and even your own customized javascript or CSS. (Is there some potential for greasemonkey-like functionality here?)

By far the most impressive accomplishment is the improvements in rendering, CSS, and Javascript. As I’ve noted before, the ACID2 test results are amazing, and I have yet to find a site heavily using AJAX that doesn’t work (I am sure there will be some, inevitably, but it’s a good sign that Opera is no longer playing catchup to the AJAX boom.)

They’ve also implemented some widget support, which seems to be generating some buzz, but frankly isn’t something that has gotten me particularly excited.

Another weird thing they added is tab thumbnails — if you hover over a tab, it shows you a little screencap rendering of the screen, along with details about the page (see the image to the right). It looks kinda cool, but I haven’t really found it to be particularly useful so far. Their explanation of this feature:

Opera conserves system resources and uses less memory than other browsers so it’s easy to have many tabs open at once. But just what tab had that video you wanted? Using the thumbnail feature, you can find out by resting the mouse on any tab.

This seems a little silly to me — how do you lose a tab? Or to be more specific, what is looking at a tiny screencap of the window going to tell you about the tab that the page Title in the tab doesn’t already? This is a terribly minor gripe, but I hope that eye-candy features like this aren’t the beginning of a trend that would see Opera bloat up significantly.

Certainly that’s not a concern for me now — I believe that Opera 9 feels significantly faster than 8.x in Linux.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with the latest release from Opera. I still think the biggest gap between Opera and Firefox is and will continue to be the lack of extensibility. It’s hard to beat the massive variety of Firefox extensions available, and some of the Opera clones just don’t cut it (for instance, the Opera web developer toolbar, which is quite nice, but not as nice as Firefox’s Web Developer extension.)

But I won’t be switching to Firefox anytime soon, as long as Opera keeps up the good work in making a solid, secure, fast web browser.