Opera is an Internet browser and it has built in a lot of tools in order for you to have a safe and easy browsing session. 

The 9th version comes with a lot of new features and it is a real upgrade if you are still using Opera 8. It has built in the widgets support, a BitTorrent client, a thumbnail preview when you hover over a browsing tab, a site preferences engine and it has also an improved rich text editing features. This version comes with the possibility to add your favorite search engines. Since a certain minor version of Opera 9, the developers introduced the Speed Dial functionality which can be used in order to quickly access some predefined Web pages. 

It still has the features that were implemented in the previous versions of Opera. It comes with a very good tabbed browsing engine, mouse gestures, a very good password manager and my favorite feature: the possibility to save the browsing session. In order to have a better browsing session it has built in a Trash Can where it places a closed Web page if you accidentally close a tab. This means that you can easily restore an accidentally closed tab. 

Another very good feature of this browser is the form filler engine. You can fill in very quickly all kind of Web forms when you need to register for certain Web services. You have to configure this feature from the browser's 'Preferences' panel. 

In order to have a good communication with the rest of the world it comes with a built in IRC client and with an e-mail client which can access POP/IMAP mail accounts. You can also send emails because it features SMTP support. And because Opera doesn't want you to have the impression that something is missing, you can find there a RSS/Atom news-feed reader. 

Opera is also known for its speed. It has a very good startup and rendering speed, in the same time being resource friendly. From the resources point of view, Opera is one of the most resource friendly browsers while it provides a lot of functionality. 

The rendering engine of this browser is very good. It had some issues in the past but now, if the Web page is made in compliance with the W3C Web standards,usually there won't be any rendering errors. Opera is also one of the browsers that have passed the Acid2 rendering test. You can take a peek at my screenshots that I took while testing Opera and Acid2. 

Pluses: it has lots of built in features, it comes with new built in tools since this version, it has a very fast and resource friendly rendering engine, it has a very good cache management. This is one of the browsers that have taken the Acid2 test. 

Drawbacks / flaws: the only thing that I miss in Opera is the integrated spell checker and the text input history. 

In conclusion: this is a very good Web browser. It's worth trying it and I'd say it is even better than the bundle Web browser, Safari, and a strong competitor forMozilla Firefox. 

version reviewed: 9.22