Opera 9.0 Technology Preview 2
Opera 9, Technology Preview 2 has just been released. With changes. Read on and get the meat of the story: Widgets, thumbnails, BitTorrent and more.
Widgets
Yes, Opera 9 now features Widgets: Small web applications that run outside the browser, directly on the user’s desktop. These widgets, unlike a regular browser, has cross-domain features, so it’s an ideal platform for delivering Web applications that interact with multiple online services at once. Opera Widgets are cross-platform, and run both on Windows, Linux and OS X.
Since widgets are chromeless, they’re also ideal for eye-candy applications, such as this analog clock:
If you are a developer, and would like to get started with widget development, see the Widget developer’s page — the tutorials there are:
- End-user documentation (the really-quick user documentation is: Install the TP, press F6 and then “Add”)
- Your first widget: Hello World!
- Animate your first widget
- The Opera Animation library
- Deploying widgets
Over time, more documentation for developers is going to be added to this page, from the simple to the more complex.
With widgets, Opera is also introducing OWAL, the Opera Web Applications License 1.0 which allows authors to reuse libraries developed by Opera for widget development.
Content blocking
Opera has always had the opportunity to block unwanted external content. Up until now, this has been an expert-only feature, requiring editing of the urlfilter.ini file. Well, those days are long gone. You can now right-click on any page, and select “Block content” to block external images, flash movies:
If you want to see more of the content blocker, my colleague Petter Nilsen has written in-depth about it, with multiple screenshots.
BitTorrent
Yes, BitTorrent is back. This is technology previously previewed in the 8.10 cycle, then it went away for a few versions. The client has improved since then, in addition to bittorrent search being added. Use b [search term] in the address bar to search files directly on search.bittorrent.com
opera:config improvements
opera:config, introduced in Opera 9 TP1, has seen some major improvements, style-wise:
Not only is the styling improved, the functionality is also improved, as every item in the file now has a permalink, signified by the »
after an item, so pointing users to the exact setting you’re refering to is as easy as creating any other link on the web.
Web page thumbnails
Opera 9 tp2 features Web page thumbnails when you hover over tabs:
Not only are these thumbnails in the tabs, but they are also added as an option to the Ctrl-Tab cycle:
The Ctrl-Tab is turned off by default, but can be turned on by checking the option Use Thumbnails in Window Cycle in opera:config
Again, you can view more screenshots over at Petter Nilsen’s blog.
History
The history panel and history tab in Opera has seen some major improvements in this version: The history is no longer a flat list of items you have visited. Instead you now have these views:
- Time and site view: This view groups your site into “Today”, “Yesterday” and similar, with the domains you’ve visited grouped as subfolders inside this view.
- Time view: This view groups your history by date, and keeps the sites visited on that date in order, with no other particular grouping.
- Site view: Like you probably already guessed, this simply organizes your history by domain.
Error console
The error console in this preview is pretty much all new. First of all, it’s now renamed from “JavaScript console” to error console, because it now is host to all of the error messages in Opera: M2, Java, JavaScript, CSS, XML, XSLT, SVG, Network, and BitTorrent errors.
Source viewer
The source viewer/editor, introduced with TP1 has seen further improvement, as it now also syntax highlights source
Customizable searches
The searches in Opera are now customizable from the Search tab in (the improved) Preferences:
Again, Petter has more details on search customization
Site-specific preferences
If you need to customize aspects of a site, like change its plug-in settings, alter the appearance by pointing to a different stylesheet, changing cookie settings or similar, Opera now has site-specific preferences:
Access to the site-specific preferences is through an extra menu item in “Quick preferences” (F12) which will open a dialog with the preferences for the site you’re currently visiting.
labs.opera.com
In conjunction with the release of this preview, the new Opera Labs site is also set to go live. Bookmark it, visit it, and subscribe to the RSS feed.
Much more: Changelogs
There really is much more, but if I was going to delve into it all, this would end up as the longest blog post in history. I’d suggest checking out the changelogs, where you’ll also find the appropriate changelogs:
In addition to these, you can read some other Opera employee postings on Opera 9 tp 2 (This list is live):
- Tim Altman
- Moose: On internal stylesheets (he has loads and loads of more links, explore his site)
- Peter Karlsson: Changes in preferences
- Anne van Kesteren: Opera 9 Preview 2
You’ll find the appropriate download links in the changelogs. Remember: This is a technical preview, not production software. Which means that we appreciate bug reports and feedback, which you can do by filing bugs, and/or posting in the Beta testing forum.
Enjoy!
Update: This article has been translated to French by Sébastien Guillon. A big thanks to him.
Comments
Comment from Jon on 2006-02-07 09:53
my god. it’s full of stars.
This is amazing, you are amazing, i have not the words with which to express myself (“calm down, it’s just a web browser” come to mind).
Seriously, why didn’t I buy stock last year when you went public?
Comment from Edward Clarke on 2006-02-07 10:57
Good review. I dismissed Opera after V6 as it was featureless and I spent too much time switching to IE just to get the web working but this looks worth trying out…
Comment from Jim on 2006-02-07 16:41
It’s a bit hard to subscribe to the Opera Labs feed when it’s not linked to anywhere on the site and autodiscovery isn’t set up either! How about you give us all a hint by telling us where it is? :)
Comment from Arve on 2006-02-07 17:00
Duh, the feed icon, which was there, is gone now. I’ll have a chat with the responsible parties.
Comment from John on 2006-02-08 16:45
The one thing opera lacks:
ctrl+f firefox style. It should find while i type so i can refine as i type.
Comment from mrd on 2006-02-08 18:34
John, Opera has had find-as-you-type for a long long time. However you have 2 varieties. Find in all test (preface your typing with a ‘.’) or find only in links (preface your typing with a ‘,’).
Comment from Chris Hester on 2006-02-09 17:10
In Firefox I just press F3. Try it.
In Opera I replace the Google search form with “Find in page”. You can do this from the Preferences.
Both work in similar ways. I love the way you can highlight all instances of a word, and move between them easily. I use this power feature a lot.
Comment from Jiu on 2006-02-11 03:27
Opera has find-as-you-type too, it’s great that you can start typing even before the document being loaded. It does not work well with some IME as my experience, however.
Comment from doni on 2006-03-12 12:33
Wow! Actually I’m a happy Mozilla Firefox user, but kinda liked Opera somehow. But I always felt unhappy with it after a little time of using it: to much overloaded, standard compliance failures that just sucked, and on.
But now they’ve taken great steps at Opera: they removed the advertisement banner in 8.5 and made the browser look simple&sexy. I’m browsing around with Opera 9 preview 2 since 2 hours or so and like it quite much. CTRL + TAB (with thumbs) is a great thing, bittorrent support is cool, had no problems with displaying websites, just a great browsing experience. The latest thing the should do is to open their code, that would be truelly awesome!
Just a little list of things I miss here:
- the wonderful new searchbar from firefox
- good syntax highlightning in source code view (I’m a web developer, this is quite important to me)
- standard RSS feed icon ;-)
A question: Is there a way to make the page preview thumbnails on the tabs apear faster (now there is a 2 second delay, I think).
greetings
doni
Comment from Arve on 2006-03-12 19:53
To answer your question, doni:
(As for the Firefox search bar, you are talking about an extension? I have a stock 1.5.0.1 install, and the search field right of the address bar is pretty similar to the one in Opera)
Comment from Michael Legmig on 2006-03-17 23:03
Well, the AdBlock feature is fresh (though I like the fine-grained control in konqueror 3.5.0+ better, since I can actually modify the URL if I need to), but unfortunately, the three buttons on the “block bar” are missing on the first attempt. They are simply gone, there’s just nothing right of the “block icon”. When I close the page and re-open it, it usually works, so I count that as a bug.
I still loathe the mail client (not only for the fact that I don’t want a mail client in my browser, but it’s also ugly to me) and including a torrent client is the same kind of mistake. I also loathe the sidebar, but it seems everybody elses loves them. I don’t understand why making the browser re-render the page only to show my bookmarks is a cool feature, but hey, I may be too much yesterday to understand that.
Whatever. At the time of this writing, Opera 9 has become the least annoying solution for browsing under Windoze for me (not that I use Doze that often .-), meaning it just toppled Firefox from its #1 position. Although I have to say that with a tear in my eye since I think the app is going into the wrong direction, as are many others these days. The age of “integrate everything” should rightfully be buried :/
Comment from Michael Legmig on 2006-03-17 23:07
P.S.: Sorry to spam here, but I forgot that: Whilst being absolutely cute, what is the point in having a browser host my desktop widgets? Once I close the browser it’s all gone. I feel a clock, a calendar, a weather applet or a a calculator are all autonomous objects … why the heck would anybody want them to depend on an application like a browser??
God, I begin to feel so old :/
Comment from Arve on 2006-03-18 08:27
Try a newer build, from the weekly builds — you can indeed edit the blocked list. Before you click on “OK”, just click “Details”.
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