Opera 9 Build 8219

Opera has long been a browser with some innovative features. They were the first to come up with tabbed browsing (that I recall) Now they are stepping up the ante with weekly tester builds which can be found at the Opera Desktop Team site.

I have been trying Opera on and off since version 5. One of the biggest holdbacks, of course, was that you was shareware. Then they came up with the ad-supported free version (blech). Finally, they went with a totally free version.

This sparked my interest. (What can I say, I'm not rich.)

However even still, there were issues that kept me from adopting Opera -- such as the ability to use WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) or rich text blog editors such as TinyMCE. They did not work in Opera. With the upcoming version 9, this has been addressed.  (Update:  Apparently I must stand corrected as The Blogger WYSIWYG editor still does not work.)

A big change is the introduction of widgets. Now this feature has good points and bad points depending if widgets are you thing or not. The nice part is, if you don't like widgets, then you don't need to use them. Check out their widget page to find out more about them.

There are dozens of changes and improvements to Opera and if Firefox keeps giving me issues, I may just permanently switch :)

Technorati Tags: Browsers, Opera

More to come ...