The much-awaited Opera 9.5 was released on Thursday. There are several improvements that I’ve been waiting for, especially the optimized mail and RSS feed engine. Opera no longer freezes for a while when you have a lot of feeds subscribed - according to the devs this is due to better spreading of the load among CPU cores. It was pretty much the only beef I had with Opera. Took me about 15 minutes to convert my 70,000 email messages into the new format though.

9.5 also sees the addition of a live search which kicks in when you type a term into the address bar. It doesn’t only search through past URLs and page headers, it goes through the content of the pages in your history as well - in real-time!

There were other minor changes I found useful - after downloading a file, you can now open its destination folder directly in the Transfer menu. The image toggle, which lets you choose between showing all images, showing only cached images, or disable images, is now enabled by default in the status bar. There’s also a funky feature called “Create follower tab”, which creates an empty tab in the background. Any links you click on your current tab will then be opened in the follower tab, instead of the current page. The “Next/Previous” buttons, which automatically tries to detect if there are any next/previous links on the page, also have a higher success rate now.

The full list of changes is available in the changelog. There are other features that are great but I don’t use much (or rather, that I have never found an issue ): security updates, speed improvements (Opera was already fast anyway), fraud protection, etc.

It’s not all good though (this is to prove I’m not a blind fanboy). As many people over at the dev blog are saying, the release seems a bit rushed (probably to beat FF3 to the finish). As a result, Opera doesn’t seem as stable as before. It tends to crash if you leave it running for a few hours. The new default skin is pretty ugly as well, but that’s easily fixed by getting the classic skin here.

The dev blog does mention that the number of Opera users has doubled since the v9 series launched, which is good but still amounts to less than 1% of the market share :(. Opera users, evangelize more!

Three more days till the June 17 launch of Firefox 3, I’ll update then with any benchmarks I find.

Popularity: 43% [?]

Internet Explorer 7 is currently in beta and slated to be released next year with Windows Vista. Looking at the specs on it though you have to wonder if anyone is expected to be impressed with it. Its “new features” are more like “features-which-we-didn’t-think-of-but-we’ll-call-them-new”.

If you’ve used Opera, or Mozilla Firefox - and you really should have - you’ll be nodding your head right now. In fact you probably couldn’t imagine using Internet Explorer ever again, and silently scream when you have to work or surf away on another computer and it only has IE installed.

I used FF first, and then switched to Opera, and I must say Opera is a whole new experience altogether. Let me see:

Tabbed browsing

Alright, FF has this too; IE6 doesn’t, of course. Opera keeps a step ahead by giving you previews of the page when you mouse over the tab, and you can easily close, duplicate, and rearrange tabs on the fly.

Sessions
FF and IE don’t have this. You can save all your currently open pages as a “Session” to be reopened later. Very handy, especially for all the blog-addicts out there who simply must visit their friends’ sites each day.

On top of this, upon closing Opera the pages you were viewing are saved as a session, and you have the option of resuming your browsing the next time you fire up Opera.

At work, it’s a huge, huge convenience to be able to simply close my browser at the end of the day and just head off. Seeing as doing programming usually means you have many references, tutorials, or documentation pages open at one time, this simple feature means you don’t have to painstakingly go through every page to see if there’s anything you need to bookmark; just Alt-F4, see you tomorrow. Even better, this “memorization” happens in real-time. If your computer crashes or you have a blackout, Opera will still be waiting with your pages while the Mozilla and IE users beside you scream and have to hunt down their pages again.

Trash Can
Automatically stores any page you’ve closed in the current session so you can reopen it easily. Not too big a deal, but still convenient and saves time wading through your History folder.

Mouse Gestures
The reason why I checked Opera out in the first place and still its best feature. Opera takes shortcut keys a step further, and focuses on letting you surf one-handed. Holding down the right mouse button and moving the mouse in certain directions let you perform common actions. Down-> Right for example closes a page; Down opens a link in the background; Up -> Down refreshes a page; -> Left simulates the “Back” feature; -> Right the “Forward feature”, and many more. And it’s all customizable to boot! Never again do you have to let that itch on your head go unscratched while surfing, because you can go “look-ma-one-hand!” with Opera.

Read more about gestures here.

Built-in Rss Viewer
Half of you out there may not know what RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds are. Sites which support RSS (they’ll have an icon like this: somewhere on the page) can send headlines or small excerpts of new articles or features to your RSS program. This saves a lot of surfing time - try it, and you’ll see.

With most browsers (including IE of course ), you need an external RSS program to get the feeds from your sites, with Opera it’s all built-in, so you just click on the RSS link on your site of choice and you’re set to receive headlines in an email-like interface.

Great transfer handling
You can resume/restart transfers like in Firefox, but even better, you can perform operations on the file right in the Transfer history window, i.e. copy, open, delete, extract, etc. IE6 has…zilch.

Customizable search

Most other browsers only allow you to specify a preferred search engine. Opera allows you to add and customize search settings. By default, typing “g [search term]” will search Google; “n [search term]”, Google News; “o [search term]”, Opera Support; etc. With a bit of fiddling you can get assign your own prefixes to search through any site - I’ve configured mine, for example, to use “w [search term]” to search Wikipedia and “l [search term]” to search LowYat.net.

Customizable popup-blocker

You can right click on any offending ad in a page, and choose “Block Content” to automatically block it. That’s not all, either - you can specify the blocking level, e.g. http://ads.ign.com/advertisers/*, http://ads.ign.com/*, http://*.googlesyndication.com. Mucho better than IE’s (very annoying) popup blocker.

Syntax-highlighted “View Source”!
Simply awesome feature. In FF and IE “View Source” leaves you with an unending block of text in Notepad, Opera highlights everything for you.

Sweating the small stuff

Double- or triple-clicking any text on a page automatically highlights the word/paragraph and a pop-up menu immediately appears with the option to look it up in the Dictionary or Encyclopedia, copy it, search for the term, or translate it. Instead of just a “Paste” option when you want to paste a link to the address bar, you can choose “Paste and Go”.

It’s fast!
The best thing of course is that Opera does all this fast. “Fastest browser on Earth” is its tagline, and it lives up to it. To be fair to Firefox, it is open-source, and many of these Opera features can be added with FF extensions. However the extensions are a hassle to download, and usually add processing time. Opera does it all out of the box, and in a blink. It uses less RAM as well.

IE doesn’t have the features, and is *still* slow. To give you a simple example, try creating a page that consists of a 1×1 or 1×2 pixel image (something like this: tiled across the entire screen.

Load it with IE, then load it with FF or Opera. Tell me how IE does.

There are a lot of features I haven’t covered - Opera’s customizable interface, page scaling, Widgets, Bookmarklets, built-in Bittorrent support, a better adherenece to standards than IE, better security - the list goes on. But come on, the download is only 4+ MB and it’s time to sleep…

Popularity: 41% [?]