Browser World

Opera 9.0 Technology Preview 1, Bernie Zimmermann

When I saw the following posted on Digg I have to say I was a bit sceptical:

The list of standards compliant features in the latest preview release
of Opera 9 makes sticking with Firefox even more difficult.

However, after reading the list of changes that have gone into the next major version of Opera it’s a little harder to refute that claim.

The first “Technology Preview” of Opera 9, which is already available for download, is chock-full of changes that have more than piqued my interest.

Opera 9 features an enhanced popup blocker; a Firefox-like opera:config
file for managing preferences; its own source viewer (instead of
opening source in Notepad); reworked keyboard shortcuts to match what
people have grown accustomed to in Firefox (e.g. Ctrl-T for opening a new tab); support for Atom 1.0 feeds; support for Web Forms 2.0; support for canvas; a UA string that finally has some balls (i.e. identifies itself as Opera instead of IE); full support for XSLT 1.0 and XPath 1.0; a whole slew of Acid2 fixes; better CSS 3 support; and finally, “tab locking” which allows you to lock a tab so that it can not be closed.

The full changelog is available over at Opera’s website,
but you don’t really need to see the full list to appreciate what kind
of release Opera has in store for its next major version.

It will be very interesting to see when the final release is unveiled in relation to the forthcoming release of Firefox 1.5.