Opera 9 released!!

The official update of my favorite web browser just got released. I haven't had much time to play with it, but I'll make a few comments.

The widgets are kind of cute, but I'm not sure how useful they are. There is a nice weather widget and a Pandora widget. Apparently, widgets are a big hit in Mac OS X.

I really like the fast forward command. By pressing "SPACE", the browser will automatically search for the most likely "next" page. This seems to work for some sites (e.g. picture galleries and Tom's Hardware articles), but unfortunately, not on New York Times articles. Though imperfect, it still beats clicking or searching for the link "next".

There is now a trash can so that if you accidentally close a tab, you can retrieve it. You can also open webpages in the background. This is especially useful if you're reading the news and want to quickly scan a page (like Bloglines) and open a bunch of articles but not leave the page you're reading. It saves a lot of "CTRL-TAB"ing. The command is invoked by either middle-clicking, CTRL+SHIFT+click, or CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER on a link.

You can also save sessions! This is useful if you want to save all the tabs you opened and don't have time to read them at the moment.

A minor annoyance: I get confused now because to open a new tab, you use "CTRL+T" instead of "CTRL+N". I guess the change is to put Opera in line with other browsers like Firefox.

For more information about the new Opera 9 features, see this link.