Opera 9.0

Opera is another web browser and Internet suite which is gathering popularity these days. Developed by the Opera Software company, it handles common Internet-related tasks such as web sites browsing, e-mailing messages, managing contacts, IRC online chatting, downloading files, and reading web feeds.

Developed as a research project at Teleno, it spinned off to a separate company named Opera Software ASA with the first publicly available version released in 1996. Today it is one of the most preffered internet browser competing with IE and mozilla. Opera was the first browser of all to feature tabbed browsing windows. There is a clear "Add new tab" button and when you move the cursor over a tab, you get a thumbnail of the site on that tab.

Main Features of Opera 9.0 are :
1. Widgets : Widgets in Opera are more like small standalone applications that can interact with the internet and live outside the browser, rather than interface elements that can change the basic behavior of the browser.
2. Content blocking : Adblock is in built utility to block offensive content in addition to pop up blocking
3. Bit torrent support : The new BitTorrent support in Opera 9 is rather quiet; you simply go to a BitTorrent index web site, and when you click on a torrent link, it starts downloading it in the regular transfer page.
4. Tabbed browsing with thumbnails of sites.
5. Mouse gestures, fastforward button and shortcuts for copy-paste URLs.
6. Progress bar at the right of the address bar, which tells you what percent of the page and the number of images that have been loaded from the site.