I came across CyberNotes’ exclusive preview of the upcoming Kestrel Alpha via Slashdot this morning. I’ve embedded their screencast review below:

The features shown off in the video look like they will please a lot of Opera users and maybe even a few non-Opera users. Here’s a high-level overview of some of the major features to expect in the first alpha of Kestrel (Opera 9.5), which is set to be released tomorrow:

  • Speed improvements in the rendering engine
  • Faster JavaScript engine and an improved HTML table layout algorithm
  • The option to open pages in other browsers installed on your computer
  • Restore windows (and not just tabs)
  • My Opera synchronization, which answers the “what was censored in the screenshot?” question
  • Full history search
  • Status bar enabled by default

Of all those features, the one that impressed me most was the full history search. At first, I thought it would be similar to Firefox’s history search, where you basically search through page titles to find content. However, Kestrel takes this a step further by allowing you to search through the textual page content of all the sites in your browser’s history, which seems like it would come in very handy from time-to-time.

For the full rundown on all the new features, be sure to read the full review over at CyberNotes.

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