Italian Born Chinese

Opera is my browser of choice. Recently they released the beta of their next version, Opera 9. Check out the changelog here. Download it here.

I’ve been using it for about 2 weeks, and here is my review. Let’s start with the good:

Block content
My favorite new feature allows you to block images and ads from a particular page. Say, for example, you visit a certain website very often, but there are ads and images that really annoy you. Now you can block them with this feature, which will also load the page faster.

Search shortcut editor
Another great new feature, you can now add a search shortcut from any search form you find in any website. Previously I used a separate program that modified the search.ini file, but it was harder to add a new search. Now you just right click on a search field and click on Create Search.

Site preferences
You can set preferences for each single website. You can set cookies, pop-up options, display options, scripting options, browser ID…

Website Rendering
Many websites that did not work previously are now working. For example gmail works without problems, Wordpress’s editor can also display the rich text version.

BitTorrent
Opera is the first browser to integrate BitTorrent downloads. When clicking on a torrent file, Opera starts the download as if it were a normal file download. The user does not need to know anything about bittorrent to make it work. And it does work, perfectly. This will not be useful for BT power users like myself (I will still use uTorrent), but for the average user this is opening a whole new world to them.

Enable proxies in quick preferences
It is now possible to enable proxy servers in the quick preferences (F12). You have to set the proxy server first, but then you can switch back and forth easily. This is especially useful to me, when using Tor to circumvent the Great Firewall.

opera:config
It is now possible to set many more options with opera:config. Previously these settings could be done by editing .ini files, now you can set them with this new feature, which also includes a search field. Great feature for power users.

Find highlights
The ‘Find’ feature now highlights all matches when searching for text on the page. Now it will be even easier to find text in a page.

Some problems that need to be addressed:

• Flash is not installed by default. This is because the latest Flash 8 cannot be installed on Win 95/98, so they opted not to include it in the Opera installation. This is unfortunate for me, because I cannot install Flash on my work PC. Hopefully in the future they will release two versions, one with Flash 8 and one with Flash 7.
• Widgets. Not sure they belong to a browser, even though they could be useful. However I tried a weather widget, and it started eating up CPU. Not using them anymore.
• Keyboard shortcuts changed. They changed the new tab shortcut from CTRL+N to CTRL+T, in order to conform to other browsers. I think this is a good idea, but for us old users it’s a bit jarring. I kept hitting the old key for the first few days. Now I am getting used to it, so this is just a minor annoyance.
• Search order and line separator. It’s easy to add new search shortcuts, but it’s not that easy to manage them. It’s not possible to order them, or add line separators.

Overall this is a great product. I can’t believe I am still so excited about Opera, even though I’ve been using it for many years already. And it’s still the fastest browser I’ve tried. Check out this other review for more info.