The much awaited Opera v 9.0 is here. Currently, Opera’s desktop market share is very small, compared to Internet Explorer, Firefox or even Safari. With v9 Opera hopes to turn things around. With the release of v8.50 on September 20th, 2005 Opera got rid of the tag “Ad-Supported Freeware”. Since then it has been downloaded by millions of users, yet there has been no significant increase in the market share. According to Daniel Goldman Opera is gearing up for a serious marketing campaign. Hopefully, it will make some headway.
Opera has always been an innovator. Each of it’s previous builds were ahead of it’s time, and had something to offer that none of it’s competitors had. You can have a look at the comprehensive list of Opera’s Innovations over here . Version 9 also maintains that tradition. Lets have a look at the major new features that has been introduced in this version.
i ) Torrent Support : Many novice users find the concept of torrents confusing. Terms like torrent client, tracker, seeders only baffle them more. Opera has tried to simplify torrents for them through it’s torrent dowloader. It makes downloading torrents as simple as downloading a .exe file. However, it is not intended to replace a full fledged torrent client. So advanced users will probably give this feature a miss.
ii ) Site Specific Preferences : This is my favorite new feature. It allows you to set a specific set of rules for a given website. You can choose to allow pop-ups/block all pop-ups from a site, you can change the way cookies are handled, the useragent that opera uses and a host of other options including applying custom stylesheets. You can now disable javascript at certain malicious sites. Overall, this is incredibly useful
iii) Widgets : This is another feature that has grabbed a lot of attention. These are similar in functionality to the Konfabulator ( now Yahoo Widgets Engine ) or the Dashboard widgets in Mac. They act like tiny web applications. They use HTML, AJAX, JavaScript and CSS, and can use other technologies such as SVG. However, their functionality is limited, and are not Opera’s answer to Firefox’s extensions. There are some very usefull widgets available in the official widget gallery.
iv) Content Blocker : In it’s simplest form it is just an image blocker (ad/vulgarity blocker). Opera provides a very simple interface to block unwanted content. However, it fails to work on embedded flash content, which is very disappointing. Content blocker can be used to block any type of content, but you will need to find out it’s url from the source viewer.
v ) Search engine editor : This is another feature that was due for a long time. Now, adding new search engines to the search tab is a matter of few clicks. All you have to do is to right click in the search box and select “Create Search” option (don’t forget to add a keyword ). A simple yet functional UI is provided for managing the search.ini file.
vi) opera:config : In an attempt to simplify the user interface for a new users, Opera has removed all not so frequently used options from it’s preferences. Instead it has put them in he opera:config ( you need to type that in the address bar to access them ). This feature is obviously inspired by Firefox, but Opera’s one looks prettier.
vii) Thumbnail Preview of Tabs : If you hover your mouse pointer over the tabs, a thumbnail preview of that page will pop-up. This is a nice feature, but hasn’t been executed very well. The thumbnails are rather small and the preview pop-up is cluttered by unnecessary information like Encoding and MIME Type.
Opera has added another small feature to it’s tabs. You can now lock tabs, so that you don’t accidentally close them.
viii) Source Viewer : Opera has added an internal source viewer which highlights known syntaxes. One very weird thing is that if you switch to the Source viewer, Edit–>Find option becomes unavailable. You have to use Ctrl+F to bring up the Search Box.

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WindowFX is a unique desktop customization software.The previous version of WindowFX was released more than two and a half years ago. In spite of it’s uniqueness it’s previous versions had failed to become popular, and for a couple of years no one heard anything more about WindowFx from Stardock.
So what is different this time ? Will WindowFX succeed ?
First let us analyse the possible reasons of failure of WindowsFX v2. Allthough WindowFX makes your desktop look super cool, it comes at a price. WIndowFX does require some processing power. Back in 2002, most people didn’t have more than 128-256MB ram ,PIII were still very much in use and most people were without a graphics card. Hence, most users simply couldn’t afford to have Windows FX running on their system. However in the past few years RAM has become dirt cheap and processors have become more powerful. Entry level Graphics cards are available for a few thousand rupees. Hence, excluding the hardcore gamers most people can now afford to have programs like WindowsFX on their system.
Let us have a look at some of the features which will be present in WindowsFX v3.
► Window Transitions : WindowFX began as a software that added nifty transition effects for various functions in WIndows. This is still it’s main function. Windows transition effects occur when you minimize and restore windows.WindowsFx v3 provides 17 transition effects out of the box. You can set the length of the transition effects to suite your taste.
► Menu Animation : Just as the name suggest, this will add transition effects to menus. It worked flawlessly with all the applications I tried it on. 21 menu transition effects are provided out of the box. Again you can configure the length of the animation.
► First Appear Animation : These animations are shown when a new window is opened or closed. Advanced options allows you to disable this animation effect for windows smaller than a defined size. There are 21 animations provided out of the box.
► Shadows : Windows Xp already has shadow effect but compared to other visually appealing operating systems like OS X, it is pretty average. WindowFx provides 11 different shadow effects, including one which is similar to the shadow effect in mac. The shadows are alpha blended and looks crisp. One feature that I would like to see in the future versions is the ability to increase/decrease shadow size. Currently you can only change colour.
► Taskbar Preview : This is something that will be included in Windows Vista ( Screenshot taken from Paul Thurrott’s Review ). WindowFX shows a thumbnail preview of the window when you hover your cursor over the taskbar entry ( Screenshot ). It also works if the program has it’s icon in the system tray ( eg. Yahoo messenger and Winamp ). However, the main aim of WindowFX is to make your desktop look cool. But the thumbnail preview that pops up looks rather ugly. I prefer the way Visualtasktips works.
► Drag Animation : This comes into effect when you drag a window. Again you can choose any one of the 7 animations that WindowFX provides. I did not like most of the effects, and found them a bit annoying. The only one which I found to be somewhat decent is “Make the Window semi-transparent” while dragging option. This option also allows you to set the transparency level.
► Others : WindowFX also improves upon the Alt+Tab WindowSwitching feature in WIndows XP.Other features include adding transparency to windows taskbar as well as any application. Another interesting feature is “Minimize to size”. This would reduce the size of windows to a desired size instead of minimizing it when you click on the minimize button.Another option worth mentioning is the random transition effect.WindowFX can select a transition effect at random, thus surprising you every time.

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