This brief blog entry will review Opera v9 (Beta) on Ubuntu Linux (Breezy Badger). When a couple of features about Opera's v9 release were published I just had to give it a try. The key upgrades for me were smaller memory footprint and built-in bittorrent downloading. So, a simple visit to www.opera.com lead me to the download and installation.
To install, simply download the Ubuntu (deb) version and issue;
sudo dpkg -i opera_9*
Then run;
opera
To uninstall or convert back to Opera v8, issue;
sudo dpkg -i opera_8*
On first sight, opera v9 looks identical. Only the widgets bar caught my eye. A widget is a general-purpose term, or placeholder name, for any unspecified device, including those that have not yet been invented. Everyone seems to be jumping onto the widget bandwagon; Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and now Opera. Although you may find the widgets interesting at first, the true unity of this feature is just about NILL. Just save your resources and disable it.
Onto the bittorrent feature. This, unlike the widgets, fill satisfy a missing link between the WWW and large data downloads. Simply clicking on any *.torrent will present you with an option to save and download the torrent's data to a specific folder. Then wait... and wait... and wait... (*Czar kicks the RIAA in the ass). After a couple of hours/years check back and find the file to be completed or at least 99.999% finished. Either way, brilliant idea to keep the use of Yet-Another-Program running.
Sadly, for an unknown reason, Opera would constrain 100% CPU resources after a hour or two. Nothing seems to help other then restarting Opera. Is this an Ubuntu thing or Opera? I don't know –but it prevents this beta any usability. You should give opera 9 a try, May be next or at least the stable version is a true keeper.
