Opera 9 Tech Preview 2 available

Opera ascending? Another salvo in the freshly-revived "browser wars" (this would be browser wars 2.0 for those of you playing that game), as Opera made available Tech Preview 2 for version 9. What's the goodness? For one thing: Widgets! Perhaps my sarcasm wasn't evident as you read that... Widgets? Jeez, do we really need yet another widget engine? OK, I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and hope somehow these will become useful and not be resource hogs... I know it's just Ajax, but did they really have to do it? Looks like those rumors were true.

Of course, the bigger news is Bittorrent support. That's pretty cool for a browser. Makes sense though, as people like Kevin Rose and many others are using it to ease bandwidth for their servers. Of course there are the usual improvements to things like blockers of every stripe, and prefs, a little more history tweaking, etc. Actually the history thing is quite nice for me, as you can now group by date or site, which makes sense as well. Then there's the thumbnail previews of tabs, which looks interesting, and they claim it won't kill the CPU, but I'm anxious to try it on my world-famous Lousy iBook of Doom. From what I can tell via reports so far, as tech previews go, this one appears pretty stable. Don't go bookmarking your bank on there or anything, but definitely worth a looksee. Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Tags: alpha, freeware, opera