Opera 9.5

Opera 9.5 is finally available! I've been running the beta version for a while and have been pretty happy. The final release has a little more polish and has so far been perfect. It feels like I've been running it for days already, but I think the official download was only like a day or two ago...what can I says, my days are very long right now as we get iZoca ready for our beta clients.

I've been an Opera fan for a couple of years. I think I started becoming more interested somewhere around the same time they decided $0 was a better price point that something crazy like $30. Opera is my browser of choice: consistent and good css support, performance, great tab support, speed dial, etc.

9.5 has all that we've come to know and love about Opera, but feels to do it all a little faster. There is additional support for some CSS level 2 specifications, and now also includes some CSS 3 specifications like text-shadow. How cool is that. Oh, well if you didn't see anything cool about that "text-shadow" thing, then you'll need to download Opera 9.5 and take a look again :-) You can get a complete look at the CSS 3 support over at the Opera 9.5 page.

One of the things that I still regularly go back to Firefox for is the great tools available for web developers. Opera is getting better at this though. I've been using their new set of developer tools in beta for a few months. Its code named Dragonfly, and is part of 9.5. There is still some catch up, but I like what I'm seeing and find myself opening Firefox when developing a little less then I used to.

I'm also a fan of the Opera email client, M2. It got a bit of an upgrade as part of 9.5 also. There is also an upgrade to the mail database as part of this install. The mail search features are amazingly fast and powerful. M2 uses a single indexed database approach, with filtered views for browsing through mails. This is little different to the traditional folder based approach that a lot of other mail clients use. At first you may ask yourself how can this mail be available in 3 different folders all at the same time. The short answer is that the folders are just "views" of the mail data. Its pretty powerful once you experience it and get accustomed to it.

So far, not single issue to report. The only real problem that I never found a workaround for while in beta was some flaky behavior when connecting to some public wi-fi hot spots that force a bunch of http redirection just to get started. That seems to be corrected 100% as of the official release.