RutSum

Opera 9.5 Beta 2 (Kestrel) Is Awesome

Probably people will think that I am exaggerating. But I’m not. I am an Opera addict, I can’t stand Firefox, and am so hopelessly dependent on mouse gestures that I keep doing {down + right} with my mouse even when my PC is off.

Opera 9.27 had disappointed me, mainly because it was a slow, buggy release and it was horrible at handling Flash and other embedded content. But still, I have been living with gray boxes, without YouTube for the past one month.

Opera Kestrel Beta 1 was disappointing too. On my PCLinuxOS system, it kept on crashing randomly, and the average time for one session was no more than 5 minutes. Moreover, I had been silly and forgot to take up a backup of my settings, and so when I wanted to downgrade, I couldn’t because the upgrade broke all my settings files, and I had to start afresh.

This time, I was smart enough to take a backup before doing anything. I downloaded a static rpm from the official website, and installed it over my current 9.27 installation, because I wanted to retain all my settings. I did this using -

$ sudo rpm -iv opera-9.50b2-20080422.1-static-qt.i386-en.rpm

The installation took around 15 seconds, immediately after which I launched Opera. On the first launch, a dialog popped up asking me if I wanted to upgrade my mail database automatically. It was as simple as that. All my bookmarks, personal bar shortcuts, custom search keywords, passwords saved in the magic wand, everything was there, completely usable. This was very pleasing as there were a lot of compatibility issues in the first beta version of Kestrel.

The next surprise came to me when I opened RutSum in Kestrel, and yes, Flash was working, perfectly! The page scrolling was smooth, even with about 4 javascripts and 3 flash items on the page. Earlier, in 9.27, a page with flash would get stuck for 2 seconds, and then become functional, with the flash items as gray boxes. This, for me, was the biggest source of relief, because for viewing flash sites like YouTube, I had to open up Firefox.

Most people already know, but Opera Kestrel has a thing called ‘Quick Find’, which is aptly described by the devs -

Have you ever forgot the page where you found that great article or that perfect gift? Opera remembers the actual content of the Web pages you visit. In the address bar, just type one word you remember, and Opera finds the page for you immediately.

This is something that is very similar to the awesome bar in Firefox 3. I visited both the Opera and Firefox IRC channels to find out who introduced this feature first, but both the teams seem to be of the idea that they put in the feature somewhere around the end of August 2007, and they thought of it independently, and nobody ’stole’ the idea from each other.

Beta 2 is also definitely more snappy and fast in loading as compared to Beta 1. Even with the ‘Speed Dial’ on, I couldn’t feel any hiccups. It is also more compatible with AJAX sites. GMail chat works perfectly fine. And for the past 4 hours that I have been using this new beta, it hasn’t crashed a single time, even with 17 tabs opened simultaneously. Looks like they did make a release that is worthy of all the time they have spent on its development. I am looking forward to Kestrel as an ultimate browser, which would be beat Firefox 3 hands down. It’s just a matter of time now.

If you liked this post, or found it useful, don't forget to subscribe to my RSS feeds. Or you can get my posts delivered to your inbox directly, by subscribing to my feeds by email.