Opera 9.5 Final Review

Opera Software seems to have successfully pipped Mozilla Foundation to the launch of their latest browse by a good 4 days. The final version of my favourite browser is finally out and I am feeling very smug about it. The worlds fastest browser, apparently, has gotten even faster. While no one seems to be paying attention to ‘the other browser ‘, we shall take a look at its latest features.

If you aren’t using Opera, I suggest you Download Opera 9.5. I’ll tell you why you need to.

Full text search

Every word of every page you ever visited is now indexed in Opera’s database. Its one step ahead of FireFox 3’s title and URL search. Which means that even if you can recall one word from that web page, Opera will dutifully lead you to it. Which means, even if you have the brains of Paris Hilton, forgetting a web page should be a dead and buried exercise.

Revamped interface

As you can see from the screen shot, the navigation buttons seem to have gone to the beauty parlour and so have the tabs. To open a new tab, there is a big triangle button to the right. I do keep confusing it with being on the left, but that wont take to long to used to, I guess. But that’s a very welcome change nevertheless. And of course, the looks are infinitely customizable by way of skins and widgets.

All throughout the betas and release candidates, Opera did not add the new interface. But when I installed the final version, I was in for a pleasant surprise. Opera 9.5 features a very glossy and modern looking interface to go with your OS.

You can also include the status bar to show inside the address bar itself. Which saves space and leaves you with a trifle more area to work in.

Improved Performance and Security

There are tonnes of performance and security improvements throughout and the performance part of it is instantly visible. Opera 9.5 is a lot more stable and starts fairly quick. Pages which are loaded with scripts are that much more faster. Sites like Digg are where you can see these performance enhancements. They may be small but they are significant. You can see the Opera 9.5 changelog and see for yoursef what exactly has been changed.

As for the scripts and CSS test, we’ll do them when Mozilla FireFox 3 is launched tomorrow. Simply because I don’t see the point of putting some numbers if they don’t offer any perspectives for you (BTW, you can help Mozilla create a world record of sorts by pledging to download FireFox3 tomorrow).

My gripes

• I’ve always wanted proper rich-text support, so that I can select even images for copy/pasting. That is one luxury we take for granted in FF and IE.
• Someone improve the performance of the BitTorrent client in Opera. It is slow enough to the point of being unusable.
• I’d like to have the “See selection source” in Opera. Its can be really nifty at times.

Conclusion: If you want a light, fast yet feature rich browser, Opera 9.5 is an excellent choice. There may be a few issues but I guess they can be overlooked.

SatishSays dot Com Rating

7.5/10