Opera 9.5 Beta 2 Released

By | April 24, 2008 | 11 Comments

Opera 9.5 Beta 2It’s been almost half of the year since the Opera 9.5 Beta 1 release. And just today, Opera team released Opera 9.5 Beta 2. Besides bug fixes, new release also brings some improvements and new features. Check the changelog for more info and download it here.

There’s also a video about Opera Mini 9.5 Beta 2 which I’d like to comment a bit. Although I don’t want to bash anyone and it’s not the first time since I notice that, here’s what I think: There should be some folks hired whom first language is English. For some people, it should be hard to understand a guy which is talking in that video. Of course, that’s not his fault. It’s just accent.


About (Author Profile)


Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • nobody

    well.. it is another ‘too early’ beta from Opera, unfortunately, their main problem (site compatibility) wasnt fixed in any way (ammount of work put into it doesnt matter, effects are what matter) – gmail (even the old one!), yahoo mail, hotmail, tinyMCE, fckEditor, several telerik controls, and lots and lots of other stuff simply does not work in opera (or work in very limited lite mode).

    this hasnt changed and just because of that Opera is no longer important player on browser market. becaue you cant use it if you want to enjoy the web to the fullest – lite mode isnt cool.

    show me ways to make Zotero or PicLens to work in opera.. show me something comparable.

    their decision to ignore and cut off extensions killed this browser and made it into what it is now – minor player without any real possibility od coming back (their company has not got manpower to compete with thousands of extensions-writers, and people demand and expect functionality – even if only one in 1000 of extensions is good, that gives still ways more than opera is ever going to offer)

    as for the functionality.. there is no real new stuff in beta2 that wasnt in beta1. their address bar with that history search POS is a POS compared with what firefox3 did. in ff3 you can find this page (if visited ofc) typing ‘vbro’ into address bar, in opera you’ll never find it this way – it indexes whole words only, not the title, not the URL.. it is very weak compared to ff3 implementation.

    their new webdev tools are probably web based, being completly useless this way, another shot in the foot.

    opera – by means of few critical and bad decisions lost oportunity to remain on the market (strongest selling point of opera 9 – widgets – is there anybody who uses this POS? they did that instead of extensions..)

    where are: autocomplete, autoupdate, extensions, plugin-manager, WORKING and usefull address bar, spell-checker? where? what we got was link. yay, next.

  • Iron84

    “their address bar with that history search POS is a POS compared with what firefox3 did. in ff3 you can find this page (if visited ofc) typing ‘vbro’ into address bar, in opera you’ll never find it this way – it indexes whole words only, not the title, not the URL.. it is very weak compared to ff3 implementation.”

    are you fucking KIDDING? opera searches ALL THE THINGS you visit and you call it weak? ff as always copies what opera do, but in a worse worse way…bah..

  • nobody

    simple case – this page is http://www.favbrowser.com – type ‘vbro’ into opera and ff3 address bar after visiting it – compare results.

    go to my.opera.com/desktopteam in both ff3 and opera – type ‘desktopteam’ into the bar – ff3 will find it, opera – not. opera way is simply not usefull compared to ff3 one.

    yes, opera indexes whole pages (is it really that usefull? google does the same), but a) indexes whole words only – it will find ‘wind’ in ‘windy’ but will return no results for ‘ind’. b) ignores urls and titles for webpages. ergo – it is mostly useless gimmick, that is (as always with opera) very close to being good, but still so far away.

  • Iron84

    “es, opera indexes whole pages (is it really that usefull? google does the same)”

    it’s like google, but in all your history of browsing, if this is not useful, then I don’t know what it is.
    let’s say you looked a page about cats, and then after a week you need it. now, just type “cat” in address bar and you have your page about cats, without asking google about all cats websites in the world.

    and about the matching you suggest, sure, it would be cool, but it’s not a very light thing to do, unless you suppose that all users have a powerfull pc, which it’s not the case. but I suppose that in some time a firefox enthusiast will make an extension that copy the full history search, like it happend with the speed dial, and a fuckton of other things.

  • nobody

    yeah, you yourself hit the nail of opera problem – someone is going to make FF extension to copy opera stuff (what is left in opera to copy anyway? I cant name a single thing Id like to see in FF that already isnt there).

    there is no such possibility if you want to implement FF functionality into opera.

  • Iron84

    it’s not “the opera problem”, it’s the “all browsers who are not firefox” problem.

    IE8 brings web slices and activities? extension created!

    *generic browser” brings “generic feature that ff doesn’t have”? extensions created! (and a hell of a lot, i must say, since firefox doesn’t implement anything by himself)

    firefox is a sandbox in which you have to put dozens of extensions to bring to parity with opera, but then firefox starts to be a resource hog. I prefer something coded by the same people, not by some random dude somewhere in the world, even if it doesn’t have even 1% of market share.

    ff is ff just because of the marketing, and the ff zealots out there.

  • nobody

    try ff3 before you write such statements. it is obvious that you didnt.

    btw 1% marketshare means that most pages will never ever be tested against opera = opera will not work there. it is a bit steep price that opera users have to pay for low market share.

  • Iron84

    ff3 installed here, tell me the new features, apart from killing the memory leaks (thanks god), the native OS skin and the improved js performance, ’cause I don’t see anything innovative there…

    btw, i must be lucky, i don’t have any particular problem with opera, windows live spaces (and microsoft sites in general) and the new yahoo webmail (which is coded around firefox bugs, and amazingly the opera team makes it somewhat work..)

  • Mancho

    Just got the email. An important piece that will be integral to Opera 9.5 is Dragonfly. The page is updated, and yes, it’s developers tools.

    http://dragonfly.opera.com

  • w2isamoron

    nobody or W2 or whatever: Stop trolling you imbecile firefox fanboy

  • TLZ

    People have been predicting Opera’s doom again and again for years… yet Opera is still here. Stronger than ever.

    “Opera is no longer important player on browser market”
    If Opera is not important now, then whenever was it important?

    Opera is more important now that ever, espescially on embedded and mobile. Not that they hold marketshare comparable to Firefox.

    “heir decision to ignore and cut off extensions killed this browser and made it into what it is now – minor player without any real possibility od coming back”
    And why should Opera do as everybody else? I love the fact that Opera guys tries to have a “power browser” that have good stuff right out of the box. I’d had to install thousand plugins to get a FF up to par with what I use with Opera.

    Now I’m not bashing Firefox, the flexibility that Firefox offers because of extensions is not to be understated. However, it’s not the only model a browser can have and it also have weaknessess. It’s a matter of taste. Personally I don’t like to fiddle to much with stuff, but I at the same time want some features. Because of that Opera is great for me. :)

    I do definetely agree with the spell-checker though. The current one is a joke.

    “their new webdev tools are probably web based, being completly useless this way, another shot in the foot”
    I dobut it. This is exactly one of the things that have been the old dev tools failings wich Opera openely admits aren’t very good, so my guess is that they’ll be proper.

    Iron84: One of the reason Opera have so much trouble with many sites is that they downright refuse to implement non-standard stuff. (With some exceptions.) However, since a lot of important webapps do use non-standard stuff Opera automaticly fixes these sites to conform to standards on the fly.

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