Opera 9 harks back to old John Smiths adverts

Widget.
It’s got a widget.
A lovely widget.
A widget it has got.

Sorry. It’s the beer flashbacks…

Anyway, Opera 9 - Looks nice, works nice, has cool features.
How’s that for a succinct review?

Aside from the widgets (which really shouldn’t be called widgets, as I think a widget should be a widget, not a widget), there’s still some lovely features in Opera 9.

The UI is still nice and clean and uncluttered, the page rendering is fast with a nice little loading progress bar, and it’s got a fantastic little trash can that catches the pages/tabs you’ve just accidentaly closed so you can avert disaster and get back to them easily. All in all, it’s a good looking browser.
I can’t think of anything more to add at the minute apart from the fact that it looks nicer than IE7, renders better than IE7, and has better features than IE7 - not really surprising given that Opera has had many IE-beating features for the last several versions.

It makes me wonder how much easier things would be for us web developers if Microsoft didn’t have such a choke-hold on the default browser in the most popular OS on the planet.

If only they hadn’t dived into the browser race back in the old Mosaic / Netscape days…
If only they had stuck to independent standards rather than applying their own “interpretation”…
If only people were more comfortable and experienced with home computers, then they could do what I do - install a good browser and consign IE in its many flavours to the bin marked “Legacy testing only”.