A few days ago I deided to take Opera 9.0 TP 2 for a spin. As a regular Opera user 9.0 was long awaited, and the new TP sure feels pretty stable. One of the first things that striked me was that Ctrl+N didn't open a new tab but rather a new window. This annoyed me, but was easily fixed.
One thing that could not be fixed as it seems is that shift+enter in the google search field, right of the address bar, does not open a new window. Annoying if you ask me.
So this is how it looks. Not much has changed on the surface since 8.x, but a lot has happened under the hood. The whole browser core feels, if possible faster than it used to be.
SVG rendering too feels a bit slicker. The changelog also talks about partial SVG 1.1 support, but I have yet to check that out.
This is the brand new error console. The Javascript console was appearantly renamed to reflect that there's now a universal console for all errors, such CSS and connection errors. This makes Opera's error console a very useful tool for web designers for debugging code and markup. And error/warning messages are more extensive than mozilla, and out of bounds extensive compared to IE's script error box. The window caption is "Message console" which reflects that the console is not only for errors but also warnings and general message. We have yet to see what the final name will be.
I found out about some
gmail fixes in the console. Oh yeah, did I mention? Gmail does no longer crashes Opera, which it occasionally did in 8.x.
It seems as if Opera is moving upon a HTML based configuration system,
opera:config. I'm not sure whether this will be an alternative to or replacement for the regular settings dialog in the future. Only the future can tell.
There are also other html-based "opera:" internals which have gotten a new design for this version, like
opera:history and
opera:cache, which have gotten a face lift.
Another neat little feature that I discovered by accident is that if you hover an inactive tab you'll get nice little tool tip with a miniature of the page in the tab. It's one of those small sparks of creativity that makes just love Opera Software ASA.
But what I really like the most in this TP is something called widgets. When I first saw it in the Tools menu I thought, "Hmm, do they really mean widgets?".
And sure they did! A widget is a HTML document, with an XML metafile, which is shown in a chromeless window. And what's more the background is transparent, effectively letting the windows or desktop underneath recieve mouse events. There's already a pretty great number of widgets readily available, such as clocks, weather forecast widgets and games. Everything works pretty stable, including translucency, but there are other bugs. If I close a widget, I can't seem to be able to bring it back without re-installling it. It's a neat nonetheless, and this might be my opportunity to finally make that yellow notes application that I've planning for a while. That'd require some additional support for a few things.
Another great surprise is that Opera finally supports opacity, not only in png images, but also for arbitrary HTML elements. You simply add
opacity: value in your CSS.
This is black text with 50% opacity. This text should also be semi-transparent in FF 1.5.
<div style="color: black; opacity: .5;">
This is black text with 50% opacity.
This text should also be semi-transparent in FF 1.5.
</div>
Apart from that the BitTorrent client is once again functioning, and this time we've got bandwidth limiting! That's about time. Although there are better BT clients, I like the idea of having many things so integrated in one application. Which other browser is an XHTML browser, mail client, BT client and RSS reader in one integrated app?
