Opera

Freeware

Current Version: 9.50 (June 12, 2008)

Opera, the browser that has been a favorite of PC users for years, has finally arrived on the Macintosh in recent years. Similar in scope to Mozilla, Opera includes not just a web browser, but an email client and Usenet newsreader as well. Both of these are quite capable, and worth a look if you prefer an all-in-one application to suit the bulk of your Internet communication needs.

Version 9.50 - available for Mac OS X only - is yet another major revision to the Opera software, adding many key new features, not the least of which include:

• Following the release of Opera 9 last year, we re-wrote Opera's rendering engine for the coming Opera 9.5 release. As a result, Opera 9.5 contains more than a year's worth of speed, standards and performance improvements.
• Faster and less-memory intensive ECMAscript engine.
• A greatly improved layout algorithm.
• The font-rendering speed is improved significantly, along with the tiling of bitmaps.
• More responsive user interface.
• Internal benchmarks show up to 50 percent increase in speed compared to the previous core version in Opera 8. But, performance is more than just showing Web pages faster. Performance is about making your browsing experience more enjoyable and productive. In the past, we introduced much-loved and powerful features like Tabbed browsing, Mouse gestures, Fast Forward and Rewind, Speed Dial all designed to make you get more out of your time browsing the web.
• Synchronize: The preview - Log in just once. Then access your stuff anywhere, anytime. A new Internet revolution is under way and millions of people are now surfing their favorite Web sites every day. But they're not just browsing on their computers. Instead, they're browsing from practically any device: mobile phones, TVs, game consoles, PDAs. In fact, Internet users today tend to browse from various devices throughout the day. This alpha version of Kestrel contains a sneak preview with support for bookmarks, Speed Dial and personal bar synchronization between desktop versions of Opera. To check it out, just click File - Synchronize with My Opera and follow the instructions. Get your stuff anywhere!
• Full History Search - Have you ever read something interesting, but then later struggled to find your way back to that same small portion of a Web page? Now you can say goodbye to that problem. With Opera 9.5, we introduce full history search - search the complete Web pages you visited, but without requiring you to bookmark them. Unlike previous and other browser history searches which only look at the URLs of the pages you have visited, full history search searches the actual content of the Web pages you have visited. When typing a keyword, Opera 9.5 will automatically search the text of Web pages in your history. Moreover, we have directly integrated Full History Search into the URL field of the Opera 9.5 browser, making it extremely easy and quick to find what you're looking for.
• Status bar with Zoom and Image control - Opera's excellent zoom function and the bandwidth saving control of images are now made easily available on the Status bar. Tip: Add your own buttons like the developer console to the Status bar.
• Restore closed windows and changes in Speed Dial - Kestrel has an improved version of the much loved trash-can feature by adding support for opening closed windows, not only the closed tabs. You can also use the undo function now for Speed Dial.
• Improved BitTorrent performance - We added support for BitTorrent Peer Exchange to allow you to connect to more download hosts and improve your download speeds.
• Platform integration - We worked to make Kestrel feel even more integrated with your platform. Mac users can expect a nice new visual look and feel, while Opera for Linux will add a QT4 build, so you can easily adjust your skin to match the desktop. 64-bit Linux/FreeBSD packages will also be available.
• VoiceOver support - Kestrel adds support for Apple's screen reader "VoiceOver" found in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. This allows visually impaired Opera users to more easily use all of the features in the browser. For more details, please see: www.apple.com/accessibility/voiceover
• Skin - Our skins in Opera 9.5 feature improved conformance to Apple Human Interface Guidelines. We have also added a new native skin with a brushed metal appearance, for those of you into that sort of look.
• Mail improvements - Kestrel features great stability and performance to Opera's integrated email client, Opera Mail. We've added a new mail backend and new IMAP support. Opera Mail is also much faster than in previous versions of Opera. Note to existing Opera Mail users: Please be aware that you will need to install this version on top of your existing Opera version to use this version for mail. Opera will then re-index all your email, something which can take several minutes if you have thousands of emails.

The online release notes have much more detail about these new features. I would daresay that, as of the 9.0 release, Opera has become a browser that is worthy of attention on the Mac once and for all. It's quite stable, capable and customizable, and it renders pages very well - on a par with Safari and Firefox. Its breakthrough feature remains its ability to magnify and reduce pages (graphics and all) to just about any size of your choice, which is a real boon for those with disabilities. Its RSS reader is much more thoroughly developed than that in Safari and Firefox as well. Be sure to come back here again for more thorough review soon.

Opera is entirely free, eschewing the built-in advertising that was once its hallmark. Competition in the browser space is a good thing for Mac users. Let's hope that Opera can shake up the Mac browser world in a big way.