Opera 9.6 – It’s Here

After multiple Release Candidates and a Beta build, Opera 9.6 has finally arrived. The main changes are –

Opera Link : Now you can synchronize Custom search engines and typed history along with bookmarks, notes, personal bar and Speed Dial in Opera Link. I wish they would add RSS feed list, toolbar.ini and menu.ini to the list.

Opera Scroll Marker : Scroll Marker is a new feature that indicates the the previous position of the bottom of the screen after you scroll, this making it easier to continue reading. Now you no longer have to hunt for the line you were reading before scrolling. However this feature is turned off by default. Click here and set Enable Scroll Marker to 1 (show when reaching the bottom or top of the page) or 2 (always show when scrolling) (via Tamil’s blog)

Feed Preview : Now Opera Displays a formatted preview of a RSS/Atomfeed before asking you to subscribe.

Opera Mail : Opera Mail has received a host of updates. Follow/Ignore threads and contacts allows you to dismiss unimportant messages and the Go To Thread option allows you to directly view the important messages. Opera Mail now features a Low Bandwidth Mode. When enabled Opera will only synchronise new messages for IMAP and will only fetch the first 100 lines of a message unless requested for POP.

Focus on India : Opera 9.6 also includes a few India specific goodies like Hindi, Tamil and Telugu localizations for the browser. You can now write messages in Hindi, Tamil and Telugu using Opera Mail. Support for Indonesian, Ukrainian and Estonian has also been added.

Opera 9.6 includes a host of other security and performance updates that makes it a reccomended update. The full change log is available here.