The next iter­a­tion of the famous browser has been released to the open. It’s ver­sion 9.5 and it’s still in its alpha stage. Nev­er­the­less, it’s work­ing well and the browser indeed is incred­i­bly fast. Just how fast it really is can be seen on this site. Opera 9.5 (code-named Kestrel) doesn’t quite add enought fea­tures to jus­tify a ver­sion num­ber bump but con­tains some very wel­come improve­ments. It’s faster than ever before and Opera claims that the user inter­face has also received sig­nif­i­cant opti­miza­tions. The inte­grated Bit­Tor­rent client has been reworked and plenty of refine­ments have been added. More­over, there are new fea­tures like Syn­chro­niza­tion or Full His­tory Search. More­over, there’s full CSS3 support.

It’s a fine release and I really like it, even though it’s still an alpha. I tried Opera before but being a heavy Fire­fox user I couldn’t quite get myself accus­tomed to it. Things have changed now and I’d like to give you some assis­tance in using Opera, espe­cially if you’re used to Firefox.

Most Fire­fox users are quite fond of their Add-Ons who add new func­tions to the browser (Exten­sions) and allow the user to cus­tomize (Themes) the browser’s appear­ance. Of course, Opera does sup­port exten­sions and themes as well. Skins can be down­loaded from Opera’s Com­mu­nity Page. As far as exten­sions are con­cerned, things are a bit more dif­fi­cult here. First, you should check out the offi­cial Wid­gets page. Sec­ond, there’s a really help­ful list for those com­ing from Fire­fox. It con­tains 150 pop­u­lar Fire­fox exten­sions and infor­ma­tion on their Opera coun­ter­parts. You do like the spell-checking fea­ture offered by Fire­fox? No prob­lem, Opera has it too, and, quite frankly, I do like this imple­men­ta­tion far better.