Reviewer's Guides for Opera Mini

Reviewer’s Guide to Opera 9.6

Opera 9.6 is available free on all major platforms and many different languages. Opera 9.6 has the features and performance to make you faster.

Through the years, Opera has set the standard for browser development as it introduced key features, such as tabbed browsing, saved sessions, mouse gestures and more. Opera does it again, with Opera 9.6 - this time with a wider world of Opera users watching, as Opera Mini and Opera for Wii have estabilshed their arena. New features such as Opera Link and an unmatched security system are packaged in a sharp, trim UI to set Opera apart from other browsers - and take full speed ahead in leading other Opera-powered devices into a best-in-class Web experience, that only the standards-support and technology leading Opera browser can deliver.

Download Opera 9.6:

Download Opera at www.opera.com/download
Opera opens to our startup page. From here you can choose to read more about Opera, try Opera Mini, our free browser for mobile phones or join the My Opera Community.
If you want to transfer your bookmarks into the browser, select File > Import. You can then select to import your favorites from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape etc.
Now you can discover what comes in such a small download....

UI Map and full features list
What's New
- Convergence
- Communication
What's great in Opera 9.6
Search
Security
Video Tutorials
Press Kit

Review all Opera features here.

What's New

Opera 9.6 improves on Opera 9.5 with enhancements to convergence and communication.

Convergence

Opera Link, Opera's browser synchronization service, now synchronizes typed browser history and your customized search engines in addition to notes, bookmarks, your Speed Dial and personal bar. To learn more about Opera Link, see below.

Communication

Opera Mail, Opera's built-in e-mail client, now features "low-bandwidth mode" to facilitate working while on a network with limited connectivity. To enable low-bandwidth mode, click under the Mail menu option. Opera will then download only the minimal amount of data necessary to retrieve the e-mail.

Opera Mail also allows you to follow or ignore contacts or e-mail threads. Simply right click on a thread and choose Follow/Ignore to follow or ignore threads. You can follow or ignore contacts by right-clicking on a contact in the Contacts panel (see more about panels below) or right-clicking on a contact name in any e-mail.

When subscribing to an RSS feed, Opera now displays the feed in a two-column layout so you can see the content before you choose to subscribe.

What's great in Opera 9.6:

Sharp look and feel

If one word should describe the new look, it would be "sharp". Opera modernizes its look and feel in a fresh skin with clean lines and clear icons. The 'New Tab' button and other elements have been modified to make the switch to a better Web experience more intuitive for IE7 users. You may also select any of our platform-specific skins to help Opera's appearance adapt to your operating system of choice.

The color scheme of the UI is designed to not steal focus away from your browsing, but be available when you need it and to clearly indicate activity (stop button turning red).

Speed Dial

Think of Speed Dial as a set of visual bookmarks to your most used Web sites. At first, when you add a new tab in Opera, Speed Dial shows 9 blank entries. To set your Speed Dial click on a speed dial entry and either type in the Web site address or pick one of the frequently visited and open pages listed.

The circular animation shows that Web page is being loaded. Then, Opera shows a thumbnail, or miniature picture, of the page on your Speed Dial entry.

You can also add pages simply by dragging an open tab onto the Speed Dial entry.

Then, when you want to visit the page, simply click on a Speed Dial entry, and Opera takes you directly to it.

If you want to go to your home page at any time, double-click anywhere in the background of the Speed Dial page.

To delete a page from Speed Dial, just click the button in the top right corner of the entry.

To rearrange your Speed Dial, just drag-and-drop entries to swap them around.

Opera Link

Your bookmarks, Speed Dial and even notes taken in the Opera browser can follow you anywhere. Opera Link keeps you synchronized between any Opera desktop browser and Opera Mini, Opera's free browser for your mobile phone. In Opera write a note - copy directions, create shopping lists or jot down anything you need to remember - and access it on any Opera browser by simply logging in.

Opera Link is very easy to use. Just log in once and Opera keeps everything synchronized for you. To log in from Opera , go to File > Synchronize Opera and enter your Opera username and password. If you don't have a user name, click the sign up button. If you have an existing username and password for My Opera, our community site, you can use that.

Clicking the Opera Link Options button at the bottom of the dialogue allows you to select the elements you want to synchronize.

Once you are signed in to Opera Link, your data is synchronized and a green icon appears on the status bar.

Opera Link then continuously and automatically registers any changes you make to all your computers and devices. If you want to turn off Opera Link at any time, choose File > Stop Synchronizing Opera from the menu.

Quick Find

With the Quick Find feature, you can search all of the text in every site you've visited before. In the address bar, start typing a search term and matching items appear in the current view panel; each letter you type narrows the search results dynamically. Let's say you found a great vacation package on a site last week but you can't remember where exactly. Instead of looking through your history list, you can simply type "Abaco", for example, in the address bar, and any site you've visited with that term in the text will list under the address bar.

Searching in Opera

Opera gives you many powerful ways of searching the Web or your favorite sites.

Integrated Google search bar

Google is the default search engine in Opera, and you can easily search by clicking in the search field, typing a search term and pressing Enter. You can also search Google within the address bar by typing "g" then a space and your search term.

You can also choose other search engines to use in the drop-down menu. To see the default search engines used in Opera go to Tools > Preferences > Search tab. If there's an engine or site that you would like that is not listed, you can add it by visiting the page, then right-click on a search field in the Web page and choose Create Search.

Page search

When viewing a Web page, you can also search for text on that page. Press "." (period) and start typing a search word or phrase to find as you type.

If you want to use a word or phrase to start a new search, right-click and select a search engine from the context menu.

Security

Opera has long been regarded as the safest Web browser and we take our reputation seriously. We have developed many features to protect you from online scams, viruses and malicious software and protect your personal information.

Fraud Protection

Not all Web pages are who they say they are. Fraudulent pages, also known as phishing sites, are designed to mislead you to think you're on a safe page, often by looking exactly like their safe counterparts. They will try to trick you into giving away private or financial information. To help you identify web pages and their REAL owners, Opera has some features to help.

Opera's Fraud Protection checks every Web site you request and shows the security status of the page as an icon on the right side of the address field.

The security lock has different color indicators:

Yellow lock - Secure page. Click on this lock to see more security information, including information about the Web site's certificate. Certificates are used to verify that a Web site is secure to use.

Green lock - Extended Validation. The site has highest security available today, having been verified by a trusted third party.

No icon - Normal site, with no guarantee of security.

Fraud Protection is already turned on in Opera but if you want to turn it off, go to Preferences > Advanced > Security and uncheck the box marked Enable Fraud Protection.

Anti-Malware

Opera protects your machine as well as your browser with two kinds of malware distribution protection:

Sites that have been hacked so that malicious software is automatically loaded with the site.
Links that users might click that loads malware unsuspectingly onto their machine.

Type 1 is something that would typically use a security exploit in the browser (or one of its plug-ins) to download and run something malicious without the user even knowing about it. Type 2 is something that the user actively chooses to download, often malicious software disguised as something else the user actually wants.

Opera has partnered with the industry leading malware protection provider, Haute Secure, for our anti-malware solution. Haute Secure uses a combination of heuristic analysis and community involvement to aid both identification and fast remediation of false positives as well as identifying false negatives.

Haute Secure provides information to protect down to the specific link, instead of blocking entire domains. This is particularly critical because we can block specific hacked pages instead of blacklisting domains.

Private Data

Opera keeps records of the pages you visit and stores some Web pages and other personal information, like log in IDs and passwords, in a local folder known as the cache. To keep your personal information safe, you can delete this information in just a few clicks. This is really useful if you use a publically accessible computer. Just click Tools and Delete Private Data.

This totally removes the selected data from the computer.

If you want to clear your information whenever you close Opera, you can set this using Tools > Preferences > Advanced tab > History, and set the cache to Empty on exit.

Plug-in Control

Some Web pages contain plug-ins, which are third party software applications that enabling multimedia, like videos or music. Some plug-ins can have vulnerabilities so for extra protection, you can turn these off. To turn off plug-ins, go to Tools > Quick Preferences and untick Enable plug-ins.

Video tutorial

Press kit and images

Please download accompanying materials and images in a ZIP archive.

Opera

Opera Press Room