Opera 9.0 Released

Opera web browser 9.0 is here and with a lot more great features and the same fast mutil-tab browsing as before. There are a number of new features:

• BitTorrent support
• AD/Content Blocking
• User defined search engines
• Per-site preferences
• Tab thumbnail view
• Rich text editing support
• Widgets

My favorite of these are:
AD Blocking
The new ad blocking feature not only works great but also has a great user interface. Goto to any page. Right click anywhere on the page and click "Block Content". The page turns grey showing all content that can be blocked. Now click on whatever content you don't want to see on this page and it is marked "Blocked". Click the "Done" button on top-left and its ready.
Rich Text Editing support
I have been missing this feature from this browser. I had to use Internet Explorer or Firefox to do rich text work on let's say Yahoo email's HTML composer or the blog that I use, namely Wordpress, which too has a rich-text editor for writing posts. Now the feature is right here.
User defined search engines
Earlier, opera had a pre-defined set of search engines which you could use but now it has an interface support to define as many of your own, as you want. Of course there was a hack before by which you could manually add xml entries into its search engine file and use this feature.

Speed
It is as fast as ever and much faster than IE and Firefox as far as page-rendering and switching is concerned.
Page-magnification
This probably is the one feature of opera because of which I started using it. Since, I read a lot on the internet, I need very good magnification support in the browser so that I can quickly adjust the page to a suitable reading level. Firefox too has a good magnification feature but it only magnifies the text and not images and also not very good at readjusting the page to fit the new magnification level. Opera does both very well. It can also magnify images and adjust the page to fit the new text size withou much distortion.
Failings
Of course it has its failings. The worst thing for me right now is the lack of proper support for the NTLM authentication. They at least have implemented it now, it was'nt there earlier. Still, it does not work well with ISA server which is the very to support NTLM.
Conclusion
All in all in my view it is the best browser around keeping feature list and browsing speed both in mind.

Download and Enjoy!