Feedback on the recently released Opera 9.5 alpha has started to roll in now that more people have had a chance to play with it. I have to admit, I haven’t played around with it yet, so I’ll tell you what some other people are saying…

Download Junkie says:

  • We tested this early preview and it’s already looking superb. The performance is the best of any browser we’ve used, it was very stable and the Mac OS X version ships with a much-improved user interface that looks like a proper OS X interface.

Vorlath says:

  • I really have to plug Opera 9.5 right now. It looks the same. Or at least, I made it look the same again (skins, rss feeds, plugins and such). But it feels like I have a new computer.
  • Personally, everything about how Opera 9.5 renders pages rocks.
  • The renderer in Opera 9.5 isn’t just fast. It’s lightning fast. Moving things on screen, scrolling, refresh, everything just flows extremely fast.

Ars Technica says:

  • The new alpha does feel slightly “snappier” than its predecessor.
  • While still not as full-featured as a standalone BitTorrent client, being able to download torrents with a single click on a web page is an extremely useful feature and is one that I use all the time.
  • When you start typing in a URL or search term, Opera will not only auto-fill a dropdown list of previously visited pages starting with the letters you have typed, but it also searches the contents of web pages in your history and displays those matching results as well. So you can just type, say, “apple” in the URL and it will pick up not only www.apple.com but any recently visited web pages mentioning that particular fruit.

Asa Dotzler says:

  • My initial use suggests some mild performance improvements on a few of the heavier pages I visit. There are quite a few rendering glitches but that’s to be expected this early in the development cycle.
  • There are just too many sites that still block Opera completely. Not being able to use Google office apps and other top 1000 sites is just a deal-breaker for so many people.
  • Opera today looks and feels a lot more like Firefox and IE than it did just a couple of years ago and their dev team deserves praise for those moves.

Digg users say:

  • Been using for least than 5 minutes, and I already love it. most of the site specific anoyances that broke my opera 9.23 are now fixed.
  • Opera once again demonstrates its prowess in innovation with the new feature list – such as the full history search.
  • OMG it is fantastic! I think it is really faster on Mac now and works better with many websites, such as Plaxo and Google Calendar! Sweet.

You know there’d be at least one “OMG” in that last set ;)

And just in case you’re looking for some testing grounds where you can put some of the alpha build’s new features to the test, you can either head on over to David Storey’s list of demos or to CSS3 . Info, which has a section dedicated to CSS3.

Oh, and Browsersphere is still kind of a comment virgin, so if you’ve had a chance to look at the Opera 9.5 alpha and have your own thoughts on it, please leave a comment :)

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