Opera 9.2 Final now available

[mattglet]

Opera 9.20 introduces Speed Dial and Developer Tools.

The search engine in Speed Dial can be chosen in Search preferences.

This release dynamically merges a default set of searches with your custom searches.

This release is a recommended security upgrade. See the Security section for additional information.

[opera.com...]

Changelog: [opera.com...]

[encyclo]

Opera 9.20 introduces Speed Dial and Developer Tools.

We've added a new pseudo-feature called Speed Dial which does nothing useful but looks fancy.

This release dynamically merges a bunch of unwanted paid links with your custom searches.

This release is a recommended security upgrade. We can't be bothered to support older versions.

Seriously, is there any "must-have" feature or change which makes this a good upgrade, other than the security fixes? I can't help getting the impression that there is a certain stagnation in development of the browser core and the advantages offered with each upgrade are marginal and incremental.

[mattglet]

Seriously, is there any "must-have" feature or change which makes this a good upgrade, other than the security fixes? I can't help getting the impression that there is a certain stagnation in development of the browser core and the advantages offered with each upgrade are marginal and incremental.

No, there's no "must-have" feature, although once you get used to Speed Dial, it's a pretty cool feature and the Developer Tools are definitely a long time coming. I personally think they are finally doing stuff to appeal to the masses and trying to gather some sort of market share.

Too little, too late? Could be... but since their success with Opera Mini and cornering the Wii market, they are realizing that more and more work needs to be done to make Opera seem "cool", and a worthwhile browser. IE has market share, Firefox has extensions, but what does Opera have? Yay, true Acid2 compliance! Sorry, that's just too boring for the masses. I think they are finally jumping on the "need bells & whistles" bandwagon.

[Mitchman]

[my.opera.com...] explains it best, really. Most of the effort is going into the kestrel (and peregrine) branch, and that is where the major core changes will be.

[encyclo]

Thanks Mitchman, so basically 9.2 can be considered as a security update with minor inhancements, but no significant changes have been made to the core browser? Is the version 10 coming soon, or is Opera planning on supporting 9.x for a while?

[Gorilla]

For me the most important thing I notice with 9.20 is that surfing is much quicker than with the previous version. Pages load faster. When I start Opera with 30+ tabs open, the time it takes until all the tabs have loaded is much shorter than what it used to be.

They must have done important work in the rendering engine to achieve this kind of speed up.

The speed dial is not that important to me. I have for a long time used the personal bar for easy access to the sites I visit most frequently. Remove the name property for items on the personal bar and you are left with just the favicon. Easy access and a nice impression.

[edited by: Gorilla at 5:07 pm (utc) on April 12, 2007]

[Mitchman]

> so basically 9.2 can be considered as a security update with minor inhancements, but no significant changes have been made to the core browser?

_significant_ changes will be in "kestrel". 9.2 does offer lots of fixes and smaller (and safer) enhancements, but is still based on the "merlin" code branch.

> Is the version 10 coming soon, or is Opera planning on supporting 9.x for a while?

I can't really say anything about dates, sorry. But "merlin" (which 9.2 is based on) is still a supported branch for important fixes, but major development will happen for "kestrel" and "peregrine".