Opera 9.20 beta is now generally available at the Opera Labs. I’ve played with it for less than an hour and might just be in love with this new “speed dial” feature.
Speed dial is a slick way to manage and access 1-9 sites that you most frequently use. Open a new tab or hit ctrl-T to see it. From the new help page:
Speed Dial gives you quick access to your favorite Web sites. Every time a new tab is opened, you are presented with a 3×3 grid of thumbnails, each representing a Web address. To open a page, click on the corresponding thumbnail, or use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl + [1-9].
Those Ctrl key shortcuts? They work from anywhere in Opera, not just while on the Speed Dial page. Very very cool.
There’s also a little search field on that page. Took me a while to figure out how to actually tell what search engine to use… Go to Tools -> Preferences. Search engine tab. Select the search engine you want to use on the speed dial tab and click Edit. In the resulting dialog, click Details. Check the box to use as default Speed Dial search engine. *phew*
Developer Tools — Yay! Ok, so these have been around for a while, but still… yay!
I’ve been perusing the change log (windows version) and am pondering this item towards the bottom:
Voluntary, anonymous usage statistics reporting feature added
I suppose that’s going to get folks excited… I’ve poked around in the preferences and haven’t found an option to disable it yet. Anyone know how?
I was able to log into Yahoo! Mail beta. That used to never work. I couldn’t even begin to log into Meebo. That used to kinda work. Still not so great with the WordPress wysiwyg editor either.
[update] It doesn’t handle Vitalist well either. Nuts.
Final thoughts: Damn, it’s fast! If nothing else, check it out to play with the Speed Dial thing. Oh, and the memory footprint.
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March 28th, 2007 
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The usage feature is already disabled in the final version by default (explaining why it’s optional). I enabled mine since I want them to get a feel for which features I use and don’t use. Here’s how it was described in the beta (note that it was enabled by default in the beta, because the point was to test it):
It contains a feature reporting system that will report back usage of a number of features to Opera once per week. This allows us to know more about how you all use our product in an anonymous way.
The idea is that while some people tell us about their wishes and concerns in the blog and forums, thousands of people download the weeklies without giving direct feedback. By using a build with feature reporting, they will also contribute to improving the product for all of us.
Yes, you can turn the feature off:
opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableUsageStatistics
So, what does the report contain?
You can check yourself, a copy of the next report is stored in the Opera profile directory, under usagereport/report.xml. It reports things like what preferences you have enabled or not, whether you use Widgets or not, and how many bookmarks you have. Only numbers, no domain names or other sensitive data.
Thanks, rseiler! I appreciate you stopping by and explaining that.
[...] of my favorite Opera features is the recently added Speed Dial. (I discussed this back in my Opera 9.20 article). I love that little thing and am still somewhat surprised at how much I use [...]
hi i discovered this today but i found that version 9.24 is available to download
Hi webmaster, thanks for visiting. Do keep in mind the post you just commented on was 6 months old.