Solo Technology

Opera has announced today that version 9 beta is available. Key features appear to be “widgets”, built-in ability to handle BitTorrent, thumbnail previewing, built-in content blocking and some other nifty stuff.
What are widgets for Opera?

Widgets - Small Web applications (multimedia, newsfeeds, games and more) that make your desktop experience more fun. Any Web developer can create their own Widgets and share them, regardless of operating system. Try the Widgets in Opera 9 by pressing F6. Look for further development of Opera Widgets in future releases.

Here’s what’s there so far: Opera Widgets. They seem to more along the line of Yahoo!’s Widget engine widgets than firefox extensions. Hmm… not quite what I was expecting, but still worth a look.

If you haven’t tried Opera yet, it is definitely worth a look. I haven’t used beta 9 enough yet, but traditionally I’ve always felt Opera was the “fastest” of the browsers. I’m curious to see if that’s still the case. If you’re not even sure what Opera is, here’s some more information from the web site. Essentially, it competes with Internet Explorer and Firefox. All 3 have their strong and weak points… and it can be handy to keep all of ‘em around.

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