Opera 9.5 alpha coming Tuesday
Opera Mini and Opera Mobile offer blazing fast page rendering on mobile phones and PDAs. And the Opera browser for the Nintendo Wii makes web browsing on a standard television set bearable thanks to a nifty zooming feature.
So what's new with the flagship desktop web browser? Well, there's a new rendering engine, a bunch of bug fixes, and generally faster program start times. But let's look at the juicier features first.
Full History Search
Most web browsers let you choose a default search engine these days. And they keep a history of URLs you've visited so that you can start to type an address in the URL bar and a list of likely options will pop up to save you time. Opera 9.5 combines these search and history features and then adds a little oomph.
Here's how it works. Type "opera:historysearch" into the URL bar, and up pops a new search page. Type in a search term and Opera will check every web site available in your search history. That's right, it will search the full page. If you read an article last week about a new application you meant to download, but you can't remember what website you read it on, that's not a problem anymore.
If you don't feel like typing "opera:historysearch" every time you want to conduct a search, you can always bookmark the URL. Or even better, Opera 9.5 integrates full history search with the URL bar. Start typing a URL and Opera will pull up likely websites. But if you start typing a search term into the URL field, you will also see search results. For example, if you've visited Download Squad, but also several sites with "download this program" links, typing "download" into the URL bar will bring up http://www.downloadsquad.com as well as links to the other sites you've visited.
Drag and Scroll
Your mouse missing a scrollbar and you're tired of moving your cursor to the right of the screen very time you want to scroll down the page? Not a problem. Just type "opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan" into your URL bar and enable "Scroll is Pan."
Now you can click the screen and drag up down, left or right. This feature is pretty much identical to the way you navigate pages using Opera Mini or Opera for Wii. There doesn't appear to be a way to zoom in and out using just your mouse on the desktop browser though.
My Opera Synchronization
Have Opera installed on your work and home computers, and want to synchronize your preferences? Opera 9.5 lets you synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial, and Personal Bar settings across multiple browsers using your My Opera account.
Other changes
We've covered some of the more obvious changes, but there are a ton of under the hood tweaks that enhance performance:
- Opera 9.5 uses a new rendering engine, called core-2, which is the same engine used in Opera Mini 4 beta and the Wii Internet Channel
- Opera looks and acts more like a native OS X application on the Mac
- Uses a new and faster Javascript engine
- Added support for screenreaders
- Improved Windows Vista support
- Releasing a 64-bit version
- Opera Mail enhancements
Keep in mind, this is an alpha, not even a beta. So there's a chance you'll find some bugs, and there's a chance they'll be fixed before the final version is released.
