Opera browser has another new release, the Opera 9.5 Alpha (code name: Kestrel). It has some very nice improvements over the previous version, such as even faster rendering engine, bookmark synchronization, full history search, and unclose windows.
Fastest become faster? — Opera claims that the fastest web browser is now even faster. The rendering engine has been re-wrote. As far as I know, Opera is a fast browser and I feel the 9.5 Alpha is slightly faster than previous version.
Synchronization — This is a new feature for Opera browser where you can sync Opera bookmarks, Speed Dial and Personal bar between different computers with Opera installed (say, home vs. office). Read how it works.
Full history search — Unlike other browsers history search which only look at the URLs of the pages, Opera 9.5 full history search searches the whole content of the web pages you have visited. This could be very handy if you are looking for certain portion of information but forgot where did you read it. Also, you can search directly at the URL field.
Restore closed windows — Previous Opera version supports closed tabs restoration but not closed windows, Opera 9.5 now can restore closed window and its tabs.
Open with other browsers — I am sure most of your computers have installed more than one web browsers. Opera 9.5 now supports sending current visiting web page to your other web browser. Simply right click on the web page, move to Open With and select the browser.
Opera is good but…
Frankly speaking, Opera is a good web browser. I like it but I don’t use it quite often because of 2 simple reasons:
- closing tab jump back to last tab
- no support for addons like Firefox
The 1st point is the main reason stop me from using Opera. Ok, this is my personal web page reading habit:
When I read a web page, I open page links in new tabs. Then, I read tab-by-tab and close tab as I finished reading.
For Opera, its default behavior is “jump back to previous active tab after closing a tab”. It has become annoying to me. I want “jump to next tab after closing a tab”.
There is no way to set the tab behavior. I have to change my tab browsing habit for Opera… How about you?
I’ve given up on Opera Browser long time ago, the version that I used was 1.X, I still remember the software can be fitted into a 1.44MB floppy disk, due to its instability, I went back to IE, now am using Firefox.
I bet there must be tons of improvement, time to give it a try again.
I use Maxthon since many years ago, it is flexible and everything is custom
OPERA is quite good
but i still support my favorite
—MOZILLA FIREFOX
……haha
liew,
bout closing tab jump back to last tab, u can change that feature in opera option…
there is only 1 reason people left opera behind… FF has lot of useful extensions…thats all :)
no doubt that Opera is very fast ! normally i only use it for blog news research, for eg: Opera can “Open all borkmark” at once. So i bookmark all the related news website and do research before write content for my blog.
It definitely load faster compare to Firefox or IE
But one reason i dont like Opera is no add ons support :(
–blog for dream–
Opera is my default browser. It is fast and it renders pictures better than IE and Firefox (at least on my system). Tried Opera 9.5 but found its default font size is too big. A point or two smaller would be better.
It crashed on my com.. Like I say.. It’s TOO FAST AND GOOD for me com. Haha.. still stick with my Opera 9.23 now. But however, speedtest shows it really does browse faster. WAY MORE FASTER.
hi liewcf,
i was a fan of maxthon as well, loved it until recently it keeps hanging and eating up resources when i’m at hotmail site. so i tried opera and liked it.
i tried to make opera almost like maxthon. one thing that annoyed me was also the jump to last active tab thing, instead of jumping left. after reading your post, i tried again to look for the solution.
and i managed to do it. so here I share for whoever’s interested. i want to close tabs using button or mouse gesture (down,right). for button, i got it from here: http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#page (fourth item).
As for mouse, i change my GestureDown, GestureRight action: Close page & Switch to previous page
Now, the only thing that annoys me is I can’t do the intelligent superdrag&drop that maxthon can.
@dazehead: wow! you are life saver! thanks for the tip!
I tried this Opera release just to see how it feels like.
Surprisingly I find it cool – especially the way the page smoothly goes up and down when you scroll a page.
Unfortunately it doesn’t have Add-Ons. So I think I’ll stick with my trusty FF