I’ve been informed by Thomas Ford at Opera that we will see the next version of the popular commercial browser released tomorrow. Opera 9.2 brings in an innovative new feature called Speed Dial. Speed Dial lets you easily access (up to) your 9 bookmarked and most frequently visited websites. Speed Dial was first introduced on the Opera Desktop Team blog and subsequently in the Opera 9.2 beta release.
Getting Speed Dial to work is easy. Your top 9 sites will be displayed in Speed Dial whenever you open a new, empty tab. To open up a website featured on your Speed Dial, you can either click on a website thumbnail or hit the appropriate hot keys (CTRL + # or Command + # depending on your operating system). It’s just as easy to add or change which websites are displayed on your Speed Dial page. My only fear is that people might begin referring to this as “their top 9″ which reminds me of MySpace’s Top 8 and T-Mobile’s Fave 5. Regardless, I welcome the new feature.
Opera 9.2 will go live Wednesday, April 11th at an unspecified time depending on when they are able to get all of the download mirrors up and running.
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I’m curious: does anyone actually USE Opera on the Mac?
Being from Norway (home of Opera), I guess I should be proud of it. And I am, in a way. Opera for handheld devices is awesome, and likewise is the DS and Wii implementations. It’s also pretty good on Windows. But on the Mac? It’s just never been very good, imho. But I have to say, it certainly has gotten better over the years. The rendering is fast and all, but the interface… just seems so slow and sluggish… and ugly.
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I gave 9.0 / 9.1 a real go, intent on switching to it from FF. But it’s menus / icons / other visual choices just really got on my nerves, so I quit using it. Now I keep it installed to check browser compatibility but that’s about it. FF is perfect for me, except for the memory-leak stuff.
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I’ve had bad experiences with Opera in the past but that Speed Dial looks pretty slick…how does it affect opening a new tab though? It seems opening nine sites at once into a new tab would be sluggish…
@Adam: I’m assuming it would be a screen shot of the site, not a live update-able mini version of the page.
@Paul, I’m curious to why the “top 9″ lexicon is something you’re not looking forward to.
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I am using it. Its wonderful !!! I tried its Beta versions too. Now I’m using the Full version which will release tomorrow !!!
Gr8 work done by Opera !!! Always a step ahead of others….
Feature packed and much stable…
Adam Pieniazek:
It doesn’t actually load these pages. These are only small thumbnails of the pages. Refreshing them could be done on demand. But it doesn’t affect the new tab load times at all. Or at least it can be measured in milliseconds. So it’s fast, as always was.
I think the speedial feature will be revolutionary just the way tabs were, your gonna wonder how you ever lived with out it. I have never used Opera but im gonna give it a try because FF memory leaks are getting on my nerves and I cant fully rely on Safari (although I love it) because blogger.com does not support it fully.
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cousin333:
Thanks for clarifiying. I was thinking it was more like the expose feature on os x, where clicking on a thumbnail maximizes that site…
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The last time I saw Opera on a Mac, my eyes started to bleed. I know some people with Windows love it these days, but has the situation changed with their OS X version?
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I tried it and would stick with it on my mac, but it needs smooth scrolling. REAL smooth scrolling, like safari and omniweb. I don’t know if that’s a webkit exclusive, though.
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