The famous Opera Browser has come a long way since its birth, and yesterday, Opera 9 Beta 2 became available for download. There might be some bugs since the product is not 100% finished, but that didn’t stop me from downloading and trying it out for 5 minutes.

One of the new features I like the most is the thumbnail preview = being able to see a preview of a site by hovering the mouse over a tab. This is good for the big tab users like me, that always have 6 or 7 tabs (at least) open and after much Internet surfing, can’t remember exactly what is on each tab.

BitTorrent is also included on the browser, I don’t make much use of torrents anymore but I can see it being very useful for other people.

The Opera Widgets is something I’ve never heard about, but it actually looks pretty cool. They are Ajax applications that take place outside the browser, and there are plenty to chose from: games (tetris, sudoku, etc), weather forecasts, calendars, RSS feeds, and the list goes on - Check all the Opera Widgets.

The final version is suppose to be ready in the near future, think next month or something similar. On the meanwhile, you can download Opera 9 Beta 2 and experience a new way to surf the internet. You can also see all the changes made to this new version.

I’m a Firefox fan and use it every day on my laptop, but when I go home and use the family computer, Opera is always present. This situation might change with Opera 9 being as good as it looks.