Opera has to be considered the third actor on the browser market with any kind of influence and now it has released the first official beta version of Opera 9 that contains everything from a BitTorrent client and Widgets to tabbed browsing. Opera 9 has earlier only been available as test versions that didn’t have any official support from the develop, but now it has released the first official beta taking a big step towards a final version of Opera 9. Opera 9 comes with several interesting features where the BitTorrent support is one of the more controversial, but except for that it also comes with small mini-programs called Widgets. These are similar to Firefox extensions that extends the browser’s functionality.
A complete list of what’s new with Opera 9 can be found below;
- Widgets – Small Web applications (multimedia, newsfeeds, games and more) that make your desktop experience more fun. Any Web developer can create their own Widgets and share them, regardless of operating system. Try the Widgets in Opera 9 by pressing F6. Look for further development of Opera Widgets in future releases.
- BitTorrent – Instead of having to use a separate BitTorrent application for downloading large files, users can now simply click a torrent file and start the download
- Content blocker – Choose the content you want to view. Remove ads or images – it is up to you. Right-click on the Web page and choose “Block content”
- Improved rich text editing – Take advantage of rich text editing capabilities when using the latest Web mail or blogging services
- Customize your search engines – Use your favorite search engine in the search box. Right-click on the site’s search field and select “Create search” from the menu
- Thumbnail preview – It’s easy to have many tabs open at once in Opera. But exactly which tab had that video you wanted? Hover any tab to see a thumbnail preview
- Site-specific preferences – Do you need to view a site in a different way or deny certain cookies? Want to block pop-ups on certain sites only? Site specific preferences hold the key
