Opera 9 public beta with widgets and BitTorrent support

By Jan Kabili

A public beta of Opera 9 was announced yesterday. I'm not an Opera user myself, but the download is free, so I took a very quick look at some of the new features:

  • Widgets. Opera 9 has its own widgets — clocks, games,
    and other small AJAX apps. Of course, Mac users have plenty of widgets anyway, so this feature may not be much of a draw for us. You can download currently available Opera widgets, learn how to develop your own Opera widgets, and share any you create at the Opera Community site. There are a reasonable number of widgets there already, and the list is bound to grow.
  • BitTorrent Support. I didn't try this out, but it sounds very tempting. Opera 9 has built-in support for the BitTorrent protocol, so you can download large files directly through Opera without having to use a separate BitTorrent app.
  • Content blocker. The Opera 9 content blocker lets you choose the kind of content, from ads to images, that you want to block on a particular site.
  • Custom search engine. You can customize the Opera search box to use the search engine from any site.
  • Thumbnail previews of tabbed pages. Opera has had tabbed browsing for a while now. There are some nice enhancements to tabbed browsing in Opera 9. Hovering over a tab triggers a thumbnail image of the page that's open in that tab. This is really useful when you have lots of tabs open and you can't remember what's open in each. Another new feature is the ability to lock an open tab so you don't close it accidentally.
  • Site-specific preferences. These come in handy to block pop-ups or deny cookies on a particular site.

Opera 9 has lots of other improvements. For the complete list of goodies check out the change log for Opera 9.0 Beta 1 for Mac.

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