Opera 9 Technical Preview 2 due out tomorrow...Looks interesting

[tinyvillager]

Source:http://operawatch.blogspot.com/


Along with "widgets" i'm guessing this what a Firefox user would call extensions,Opera will be opening a new
sub-domain,Opera Labs-http://labs.opera.com/-where users can get a behind the scenes look at Opera
technologies.


If you haven't tried Opera i highly recommend it.And give it a real chance.Run it for a month.I installed Opera
while waiting in between Firefox's 1.5 and 1.5.01 releases and though i still have Firefox on my machine and
always will i rarely use it after giving Opera a chance.The first thing you will most likely do is start saying,
this isn't like Firefox,Firefox can do this why can't Opera,after tweaking it a bit you'll most likely get it to do
everything Firefox has done for you and then some.That's not bashing Firefox,it's a great browser,anything
is better than I.E.,cause we all know it's a security flaw waiting to happen...and it kills kittens.Little helpless
defenseless kittens.

[allen]

Another really cool addition is its upcoming native support of bittorrent downloads.  One less application I have to have running to accomplish the same tasks.

[Josh]

Is a widget just like a firefox extension or is it more just a way to add little info panels to opera like yahoo's konfab does? I.E., will this finally allow roboform to incorporate itself into the opera web browser?

[tinyvillager]

It's Up....

http://labs.opera.com/downloads/

Changes Since Opera 9.0 Technology Preview 1:Source:http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w90p2.html

Be back after install...

[tinyvillager]

So far so good when it comes to regular surfing the internet.I hate the (AJAX)Widgets.I guess it will depend on what
one finds usefull though,to each it's own.It seems to me their either glorified graphic rss feeds or silly apps like calculaters and clocks,i hold out faith someone will hack up a google map or Chat Client,lack of substance aside the
widgets are cumbersome,you should be able to bookmark them to bring them up individually,hard to express in
words but they have it rigged up where you can tack one to the screen while making the other invisible,it's annoying.


In my opinion this Menu should expand into the widget you want to show ,instead of just show widgets 

[nontroppo]

This release is amazing!

Widgets are simply web pages that can exist outside of the  browsers UI, they use all the technology already present in the HTML renderer, added with the PNG alpha transparancy without formal UI window chrome. This is not really another "feature" in the sense that it was always built-in, but it has opened the possibility for some really neat features. http://my.opera.com/...mmunity/dev/widgets/

Bittorrent is treated as another protocol like HTTP and FTP, as it should be. Obviously this will not replace a fully-featured client, but for general use it is great.

The killer feature without a doubt is Site preferences. This has been discussed in the Opera community for a long time. Omniweb, with release 5 was the first browser to come out with a live implementation, followed by others. Opera's neat spin on this is based on its excellent support for user CSS and javascript. Basically you can apply custom CSS and javascript on a per-site basis, customising your web site experience infinitely. There is also a UI for blocking unwanted content (ad-blocker), and the pop-up blocker has been beefed up.

For power users, Opera's user CSS handling has been improved by allowing a directory for storage of all your CSS files. Remixing doesn't get easier than this!

A nice feature taken from Firefox is the "add search", basically this scrapes search fields on web pages, and a new UI gives you full control over your search engines.

Tab thumbnails are now available, and you can enable them also for ctrl+tab switching using opera:config.

A small, but neat feature is the source viewer (now syntax-highlighting), allows editing of pages, including blank pages so you can code in HTML and let it preview!

Of course, the big changes are under the surface. Merlin, Opera's next-generation rendering engine is really amazing. It supports a huge range of standards with a very high level of compliance. And amazingly as always, the same rendering engine can be run in mobile phones, which proves the efficiency of its coding.

[nontroppo]

i hold out faith someone will hack up a google map or Chat Client

-tinyvillager (February 07, 2006, 05:02 AM)

That would be trivial to do. Regarding chat, what's wrong with IRC?

In my opinion this Menu should expand into the widget you want to show ,instead of just show widgets 

-tinyvillager (February 07, 2006, 05:02 AM)

Good idea, you should post that on the my opera forums...

[tinyvillager]

I don't know,seeing a little customized google map tucked away in the corner might be neat.
Yeah i know what you mean about IRC,but i've heard of people making AJax applications that
simulate google talk.Just looking at the site preferences,very impressive.Having every site
costomized to your specification is pretty sweet.I like the eye candy tab thumbnails.Opera
spends alot of freakin time on development but it shows in the end.Even though it's called
a preview i bet they'll release a final pretty soon.

[allen]

That would be trivial to do. Regarding chat, what's wrong with IRC?

-nontroppo (February 07, 2006, 05:29 AM)

Perhaps they meant an interface for instant messaging clients -- which is something I, too, think would be pretty cool.

---
All in all this is a stellar release -- I'm especially glad to see that they've taken care to make gmail work perfectly in it.  No use for the widgets, yet, but the bittorrent is worth giving a spin.

edit
This article says it will be released first half of '06.

[nontroppo]

For Operatists, here are quite an extensive set of links on the new TP2:

General: http://virtuelvis.co...2006/02/opera-9-tp-2

Search engine customisation interface: http://my.opera.com/...blog/show.dml/133235
Thumbnail displays: http://my.opera.com/...blog/show.dml/132533
The great content block interface: http://my.opera.com/...blog/show.dml/132479

Tim covers a lot of features not obvious from the changelogs: http://weblog.timaltman.com/opera/

Spatial navigation has gotten even better; OPML import/export now supported for feeds; CSS3 opacity etc.

CSS rendering has got even more solid, it is now the only desktop browser to pass George Chavchanidzes arduous stress and torture tests (makes Acid2 look like childs play!). SVG, XSLT and WebForms2 are also much improved.

Site preferences really rock. Remember, even if the UI doesn't have a feature you want, it should be possible to enter it manually. It does currently have bugs with whitelisting cookies.

[allen]

Thanks for the links, I'll work my way through them this evening.

The search interface is nice, but actually a step back for me -- I'd been using a third party editor that has a bit more flexibility, particularly the ability to reorder them.  I dont' think it's compatible with search.ini anymore, so looks like I"ll have to manually reorder them.

It is nice that they're letting us add/delete them without having to get into the ini now, though.

[nontroppo]

The search interface is nice, but actually a step back for me -- I'd been using a third party editor that has a bit more flexibility, particularly the ability to reorder them.  I dont' think it's compatible with search.ini anymore, so looks like I"ll have to manually reorder them.

-allen (February 09, 2006, 08:52 PM)

This has been requested on the forums. It is also missing an encoding option which can be important for some searches. The format is the same as the old search.ini AFAIK, so as long as you edit the File Version= string you should be able to use opsed...

[allen]

Strange -- every time I use opsed, save and launch Opera -- Opera reverts to the default installation search engines -- not the ones I'd customzied in Opera or in Opsed.  Maybe I have an out of date version of Opsed or something? (Last I knew, it hadnt' been updated in some time though)

[nontroppo]

No, you need to change the File version=n string at the top of the file to something larger than Opera's default. This is the way Opera tests to update it. Set it to 20 manually, then use opsed and it should stick...

[allen]

Great advice -- thanks!