Opera 9.50 has been released

[Kougar]

As I know there are a few Opera users here...

Opera has released the final version of the revamped 9.50 build to their extremely unpopular web browser, and it looks pretty good so far.

This is a very significant update from the previous 9.27 version that changes the overall appearance and adds quite a few more options and features. Therefore I'll warn that current Opera users might wish to try it as a separate install before performing an inplace upgrade to their existing version!

Download link: http://www.opera.com/ (http://www.opera.com/)

For a lengthy listing of changes and current features: http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/ (http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/)

So far it is looking good, and I've noticed some new settings already. I wasn't kidding though, the new appearance will take a little getting used to and some of the available menubars have changed. As always all of the interface remains highly customizable to meet your preferences though, including custom skins.

[Kougar]

I've been giving the new version a try and tested a few things before I wanted to leave any negative comments.

Users of Opera 9.27 including myself have noticed 9.50 is a bit of a ram hog by comparison to the previous version, although for the most part it is still lower than FireFox or IE with many tabs open. Just as some rough numbers, Opera 9.27 with 28 open tabs used 169MB of RAM and somewhere around 200MB of virtual memory. Opera 9.50 with 28 tabs is right now using 343MB of RAM and another 329MB of virtual memory. It also stores closed pages for page content searching of your previous browsing history, so memory usage does not drop nearly as much when closing tabs.

I am also seeing more websites that displayed properly with 9.27 no longer displaying correctly with 9.50, issues with font sizes and overlapping objects mostly. The new 9.50 scores 83% on the Acid3 test for me, for those curious... hopefully they'll release a 9.51 to address some of the new issues.