Opera 9.5 Browser Goes Live
It was a close race, but Opera finished it for title of the first next-generation browser officially released to the public. Opera 9.5, the latest version of the company’s feature-filled browser, went live Thursday morning.
It seems like only a day ago when Opera announced its first release candidate — the trial version available to testers and developers before official release. Oh wait, it was a day ago when the release candidate was announced. That is what you might call a fast release cycle. Take that, Firefox 3 Release Candidate 3.
What’s new in 9.5? First off, the browser dressed itself up for the release by shipping with a new metallic skin. Second, it is 50 percent faster than its previous release.
It also has some cool features in its 5.5-mb package not available in the full release versions of its competitors. “Opera Link” is a feature that synchronizes your settings and bookmarks across desktop and mobile Opera browsers (including the one shipped with every Nintendo Wii game system). The browser’s built in user interface allow users to surf the web a little faster and easier. For example, “Speed Dial” gives you one click access to your nine favorite sites.
The Opera address bar may just be a little more “awesome” than Firefox 3’s “Awesome bar.” The suggestive bookmarks that appear when you start typing in the address bar are culled deeper than Firefox, pulling keywords from the text of the documents rather than just the title and address.
Despite often trendsetting many of the features we take for granted in modern browsers, Opera hasn’t seen the adoption rate of its competitors. Opera is often the overlooked alternative to the popular Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers.
According to Thomas Ford, Opera’s Global Communications Officer, the browser has had a hard time shedding the perception that it is not completely free. Early iterations of the browser monetized using embedded ads or priced but ad-free premium versions available for download.
“Opera link, subscribing, everything is free,” said Ford. “We’ve had a legacy of being the browser with ads in it. We are still trying to let everyone know that we’re now totally free. Free as in beer — we’re not an open source project. We’re free where it counts.”
Many of the features built into the Opera browser are only available to other browsers through an add-on — a key difference considering Opera doesn’t support add-ons.
The company also claims some of the best web-standard support on the market. It claims to lead its competitors in the race for HTML 5.0 support and it is courting developers next.
“Opera has been very standards compliant to maybe an extreme degree,” said Ford. “[With 9.5] we worked on compatibility with the rest of the web. Maybe we can do things that maybe get developers to test their page in Opera. Our new rendering engine is a lot more permissive.”
Opera is also giving developers tools, including an alpha version of the website debugging tool named “Dragonfly.” The tool may not quite on the level of [Firefox’s] Firebug, but according to Ford, “we’re working on that.”
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