Opera 9.5 available now

Posted Friday, June 13, 2008 at 8:30 am by Jason Cartwright |

Supporting a slick new interface Opera 9.5 has an number of new features..

• More than 2x faster than Opera 9.2 in rendering JavaScript and HTML
• Faster handling of third party plug-ins
• Much faster start up time
• Superior support for Web standards (css3, html5 +more)

For all the updates check out the full list.

Overall I’m most impressed by the new tab bar (above) and the new Speed Dial interface when creating a new tab. This lets you create shortcuts to your most common links, so it makes sense that when your opening a new tab, there’s a good chance you could be visiting one of your commonly-used sites. Once setup, simply click the auto generated thumbnail for the site you wish to visit, then the desired site opens in the active tab.

Currently I had created a ‘commonly used links’ site that was my default home page, for this very reason. I actually like Opera’s interpretation of this idea, it allows for very quick updates of these links. Speed improvements are noticeable, especially in comparison to IE or Firefox.

More @ Opera