Opera has always been an innovator and their newest version is now exception. Take a look at the major new features that has been introduced in this version:
- Torrent Support: Opera has tried to simplify the downloading of torrents through it’s torrent dowloader. It makes downloading torrents as simple as downloading a .exe file. However, it is not intended to replace a full fledged torrent client. So advanced users will probably want to stick with µTorrent
- Widgets : This is another feature that has grabbed a lot of attention. These are similar in functionality to the Konfabulator ( now Yahoo Widgets Engine ) or the Dashboard widgets on Mac OS X. They act like tiny web applications. They use HTML, AJAX, JavaScript and CSS, and can use other technologies such as SVG. Though these are not Opera’s answer to Firefox’s extensions. There are some very neat widgets available in the official widget gallery…. like Circular Tetris (w00t) …
- Thumbnail Preview of Tabs : If you hover your mouse pointer over the tabs, a thumbnail preview of that page will pop-up. This is a great feature as I can’t tell you how many times I have to preview every single tab in Firefox to remember what I had loaded there. Opera has added another small feature to it’s tabs. You can now lock tabs, so that you don’t accidentally close them. One of my favorite features that Opera includes is the ability to create new tabs next to the tab you are currently working in. This really helps to group works together over time.
- Site Specific Preferences : This is a great new feature as it allows you to set a specific set of rules for a given website. You can choose to allow pop-ups/block all pop-ups from a site, you can change the way cookies are handled, the useragent that opera uses and a host of other options including applying custom stylesheets. You can now disable javascript at certain malicious sites. Overall, this is incredibly useful, especially for those nasty cracks sites (cracks.am, shame on you!)
- Source Viewer : Opera has added an internal source viewer which highlights known syntaxes. One very weird thing is that if you switch to the Source viewer, Edit –> Find option becomes unavailable. You have to use Ctrl+F to bring up the Search Box.
Other Small Changes:
* You can now use CTRL+T to open new tabs (was CTRL+N in tab mode).
* Find will highlight all instances of your search including text in form fileds.
* Support for importing and exporting news feed lists in OPML format has been added.
* Opera now passes the acid2 test.
* Default useragent string is now Opera ( that’s a smart move ).
* Opera now uses MSI installer. 30 Language packs are included with the international build. However, this has significantly increased opera’s size. The size has jumped up from 3.66mb to 6.17mb, even after removing Macromedia Flash Player from the installer. On top of that Opera still hasn’t included an update manager, that will download and update the newer files when an update is released.
