Yesterday, Opera released the latest version of their web browser, the Opera 9.6 which is now faster, safer, and it comes packed with new and improved features like Opera Link, Opera Mail, Opera Scroll Marker, and lots of changes on the user interface. Opera 9.6 offers great fraud and malware protection, lots of widgets for web apps, and it’s easily customizable.
Here are the changes since Opera 5.2:
User Interface
* Opera now remembers the bookmark panel position after restart
* Added a setting opera:config#UserPrefs|ShowBookmarksInAddressfieldAutocompletion to prevent bookmarks from showing in the Address field auto-completion drop-down
* When setting opera:config#TransferWindow|KeepEntriesDays to 0, Opera now removes the transfer history when restarting
* Sites using HTTP Auth are now saved in typed history
* Opera now stops loading pages with iframes when closing the page or pressing stop
* Page encoding in site preferences can now be reset to automatic
* Browsing Intranet sites now works after changing proxies in a running session
* Improvements to Opera Link include the synchronization of search engines and typed history
* Changed the default global history to 1000
* Added a new default speedial.ini
* Fixed sorting by progress in Transfers
* Fixed copying of multiple entries from the history manager
* Fixed a bug that could cause notes to be lost when using certain characters
* Fixed dataloss situation when note folders had more than one line in their name
* Fixed spurious highlighting when using the space character in inline find
* Fixed an issue that would prevent links in frames from being opened by the keyboard
Mail, News, Chat
* Added popular Chinese providers in mailproviders.xml
* Made all top-level access points (except All Messages) selectable
* Now copes better with broken POP servers that send empty UIDLs
* The “Large font” setting is now respected for subjects
* Cache files from feeds no longer show up in Transfers
* Feeds are now detected even when served as text/html
* Fixed the synchronization of removed labels for IMAP accounts
* Fixed an issue where the signatures wouldn’t change if the default account signature ended with a space
* Fixed an issue where sent message bodies could disappear under certain circumstances
* Fixed DCC transfers in IRC
Display and Scripting
* Improved Acid3 support: The document property has been removed from iframe objects for compatibility with Gecko, WebKit, and the Acid3 test
* Added support for the caller property on functions: http://developer.mozilla.org/En/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference:Global_Objects:Function:caller
* Special characters are now displayed properly in the Address bar drop-down
* Opera Dragonfly element highlighting no longer stays on the page after closing the developer tools window
* Script focused elements are no longer highlighted
* Fixed saving of SVG when right clicking
* Fixed an issue where custom search engines would not get a favicon
Security
* Verisign and Comodo are now formally EV-enabled
* Fixed an issue where specially crafted addresses could execute arbitrary code, as reported by Chris of Matasano Security
* Java applets can no longer be used to read sensitive information, as reported by Nate McFeters
Miscellaneous
* Added the Opera Core version (currently “Presto/2.1.1″) to the User Agent header
* Improved performance with large wand.dat files
* Fixed Fast Forward on Google search results pages
Windows-specific changes
* Fixed a bug where network paths that start with \\ would not work, which in particular caused issues with sent mail when storing profiles on network drives
* Fixed installation problems on Windows NT 4.0
RSS