Today the folks at Opera Software have released the first alpha snapshot of the upcoming version 9.5 of their browser suite.
The new version - codename: Kestrel - features tons of new features that you can learn about on a nice overview page provided by Opera Software, so here just a few things I noticed right after starting it:
- The font rendering seems to have been completely revamped. I can’t say what exactly, but anti-aliasing looks now much smoother than before.
- The OS-integration (at least visually) is now way better handled. Previously I avoided the OSX native GUI of Opera at any cost, but now it looks much closer to an OSX app than before.
- The ECMAScript engine is now much faster and nearly reaches Firefox on sites like Google Reader.
But given the alpha status, this version also has quite a few bugs or at least some hick-ups you will probably also notice right away. For example:
- It seems like you old configuration is not imported. So in any case better make a backup of your old config files before installing this one.
- When you search a link on a page (",") and then hit enter, the browser doesn’t always follow this selected link.
I also noticed a couple of other problems but I’m not sure yet, if these a just problems with my own configuration or lack thereof or if these are true bugs. In any case: If you are willing to live with these small problems, this alpha version is really worth a look and I can’t wait for the final release of Kestrel :D
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