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.