Arve Bersvendsen

Opera 9.5

Ok, I’m crazy busy these days, but I still have to write a few words, now that Opera 9.5 is out. During the last couple of years, Opera has grown several shadows of awesome:

Dragonfly

For developers, one of the most signifcant new features is Dragonfly - the open source developer tool for Opera 9.5. Currently, Dragonfly is officially in alpha, and its release schedule is somewhat independent from the rest of the browser. If you want to know what is happening to it, and to get access to the weeklies of it, head over to the Dragonfly blog

Standards support

The list here is too long to go through, it would be worthy of multiple blog posts on its own (I might make some on some aspects of standards, though). Suffice it to say that the internal core release tied the race for Acid 3 with Webkit. Note that some of the improvements that went in by passing Acid3 are not available in the desktop release at this stage, so Opera 9.5 for desktop is currently at 83/100.

The awesomest of all awesome bars

The address bar in Opera 9.5 is the true awesomebar, not that other one you’ve heard of. When you visit a page in Opera 9.5, Opera creates a full-text index of the web page. When you’ve browsed, and forgotten where or what the web page title was, the quick-find feature searches this full-text index, giving you a complete set of results.. Should you prefer to view the results in a different way than as a drop-down, there is opera:historysearch which you can use more or less like a normal search engine.

Opera Link

It’s strange how much I have come to depend on this feature. So much, in fact, that I had to look up whether it actually was new to 9.5 or not. It is, it synchronizes your bookmarks and your speed dial, and makes sure you always have your bookmarks everywhere. For me as a heavy user of Opera Mini this is a killer feature.

Widgets

Ah. Widgets. Unfortunately, the File I/O stuff is not yet to be seen in the regular builds, but there are other improvements in:

• Showing/hiding of widgets using widget.show() and widget.hide()
• Widgets can now request attention using widget.getAttention()
• Another means of requesting (more intrusive) attention, is through widget.showNotification() which will display a message, and can take a callback for when the notification is acknowledged.

Needless to say, these are all going in to the Widget API specification — I just need to be a bit less crazy busy, so I can push towards a public working draft.

Changelogs

• Linux
• Windows
• Mac
• Other

Download

That’s it for today, now go Download!