Today marks the second preview release of Merlin[1], the culmination of three and a half months of hard work. We did a lot of stuff in Opera 9.0 Preview 1 already, but we weren't finished. While Preview 1 focused on features in the rendering engine, Preview 2 includes several big user interface improvements, as well as new rendering engine functionality. And these changes aren't just fancy eye-candy (well, not all are), they address long-standing user requests, too. Read on for more details.
Feature highlights
The following is a list of the major new features/improvements in this preview:
- Widgets
- Widgets are small applications, often web applications, that run outside the regular Opera browser user interface.
- Thumbnails
- Small representations of a web page, thumbnails, will show when hovering over the tab bar. They can also be enabled for the Ctrl+Tab/Option+Tab menu[2], but won't show there by default.
- Search shortcut editor
- Search shortcuts (like 'g' for Google) can now be configured in preferences via Tools > Search, rather than via search.ini. Additionally, you can easily create new searches by right-clicking on a search field in a web page.
- Content blocking
- Tired of those pesky images of half-naked women on corporate web sites? Get rid of them with content blocking! Right-click on the page to open the content blocking editor for direct access to the filter.ini capabilities directly through the user interface.
- Site-specific preferences
- Many site-specific preferences, available in Preview 1 via opera.ini, can now be configured directly in the preferences via Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Sites. Settings that can be set site-specific are now grouped with site-specific preferences. Site-specific preferences are also available on the web page context menu or at the bottom of the Quick preferences menu (F12 on Windows and UNIX, Option+F12 on Mac).
- BitTorrent
- BitTorrent is back with a vengeance. First demoed in Opera 8.02 Preview 1, it's here to stay for Opera 9.0.
- Improved history navigation
- The history of pages you've visited can now be grouped by date and by site in the history panel[3] via a setting in the View menu, greatly improving your ability to find pages you've visited recently.
Featurelets
But let's not lose sight of some of the every day changes that on their own might not make a big impact, but put together improve Opera immeasurably. Here's a list of what I feel are the most important featurelets in this preview:
- By popular request, we removed the bookmark indicatior (star icon) from the address bar that was added in Preview 1. Update: It turns out that some users miss the star. For you, there's a solution in our forums.
- The built-in source viewer now contains basic syntax highlighting.
- CSS and SVG errors are shown in the Error console (renamed from the JavaScript console).
- The "Load image" context menu item for images will now reload images, even if they are only partially downloaded.
- Typing a domain name (sans "www." and ".com") in the address bar and pressing Ctrl+Enter/Cmd+Enter will now auto-complete the address, as in other browsers.
- Paste & Go has been moved to Ctrl+B/Cmd+B, after being moved to Ctrl+Shift+V/Cmd+Shift+V in Preview 1. The change in Preview 1 had the unfortunate side-effect of opening a new tab in the background, which often wasn't desired.
- Individual sections and preferences in opera:config can be linked to using the format "opera:config#section|preference", i.e. opera:config#UserPrefs to access the "User Prefs" section and opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableGesture to access the "Enable Gesture" setting.
- Improved stylesheets for virtually all Opera-generated pages, such as opera:config, opera:about, opera:cache, etc. Kudos to Moose for a job well done.
- Added configurable stylesheets for the image display and error pages, also by Moose. They are available in the Opera\Styles\ directory and called image.css and error.css, respectively.
- Improvements when navigating pages in history on pages with certain JavaScript event handlers. See our knowledge base for more details.
- Experimental NTLM support (Windows-only).
- New message count in Dock (Mac-only).
Bug fixes
And what's a preview release without bug fixes? Here are my favorite bug fixes:
- Lots, and lots of bugs in our SVG, XPath, XSLT, canvas, and Web Forms 2 implementations have been fixed. We have lots more to tackle, but the worst should be gone.
- The background of printed pages will be derived from the print stylesheets instead of the screen stylesheets.
- HREF attributes aren't converted to absolute URLs in DOM and CSS anymore. This fixes problems seen with external link indicators in MediaWiki wikis in Preview 1, as well as many other issues.
- Fixed problem with extra blank lines being copied from web pages and mail.
- Fixed problem handling spaces and punctuation when searching for text in web pages.
- Fixed GDI leak caused by favicons.
- Multiple fixes for the FTP back-end, specifically related to the PWD and EPSV commands.
New preferences
For our tweakers, several new preferences have been added or enhanced, which extend the customizability of Opera. Here's some of my favorites:
- Added "-1" to the list of allowed values for the User Prefs|Rendering mode setting, which changes the default rendering mode to Fit to window width, AKA ERA. Other possible values are 0 = normal (default), 1 = SSR, 2 = CSSR, 3 = AMSR, and 4 = MSR.
- Added Adv User Prefs|Permitted Ports, a comma-separated list of ports that can bypass the security restrictions on accessing certain ports.
- Added a setting to disable the HTML5 canvas element: User Prefs|Enable Canvas. This setting is not yet working, but will work in a future release.
- Added "2" to the list of allowed values for the User Prefs|Color List Row Mode setting, which completely disables alternating row backgrounds in user interface lists, such as the Opera Mail message list. Other possible values are 0 = allow alternating row backgrounds (default) and 1 = improved coloring with dark backgrounds and light foregrounds.
Download it
All this and I haven't even listed all changes! See the changelog for more details and try the release for yourself!
Read more
Below are links to other information about this preview from my colleagues:
Enjoy!
Footnotes
[1] Our code-name for Opera 9.0.
[2] Toggle User Prefs|Use Thumbnails in Window Cycle in opera:config
[3] The view setting isn't saved on exit yet. That'll come in a future release.
