i write this post from Opera 9.5 Alpha, a public pre-release build of Opera's latest development, codenamed Kestrel. since it is an alpha-build, it is bound to be buggy, but so far i haven't had any problems with the usual browsing experience. i'm not a power-user by any stretch of the imagination. download here, from the Opera Desktop Team blog.
there are new features galore and most of them look promising. there isn't anything as big and flashy as Speed Dial, but mostly little minor usage improvements (click for video preview). my favourite so far is drag to scroll (opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan).
the big thing that no one else really cares about (since only one or two other people reading this use Opera =P) is how my blog looks in the archive section:
the downward pointing arrows render correctly, but the horizontal arrows are not. the top and bottom halves are overlapped, thus forming some manner of squished arrow. this is corrected in Opera 9.5.
most of the real changes are taking place under the hood, so everything is faster with an even smaller memory footprint. the mail client, M-2, as also been improved. i will likely begin to use it when 9.5 is truly released.
2 comments:
I'd use Opera if only it played nicely with Ubuntu (which it does, but only to a certain degree). I'd also use it more if it didn't rape my text entries by making "solid spaces" (that are treated by window frames as normal characters and not separators of words). Maybe this will be fixed in the coming release?
as Opera started out as a Windows browser, there is a pretty vast performance parity between operating systems in the current release (9.23). i don't know if 9.5 will bridge the gap between Windows and Linux builds, but i know they've closed that gap in OS X significantly, even in the alpha. clearly, they are prioritizing by popularity. the core engine is getting smaller and faster with each successive launch. i think it'll be beefed up in Linux by Opera 10 (Peregrine) if not by the final release of Kestrel.
in the meantime, what are you using instead? does Konqueror work in a non-KDE environment? i r linux nub.
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