If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Image via Wikipedia

Opera has been under my radar for a while and I have to say I never sticked with it completely. I tried an old version a few years ago but the latest announcement of Opera v9.6 made me download it again.

Another reason that led me to test it out is that I experienced very bad performances with Firefox 3 on my Macbook recently, which easily hits over 700MB of RAM usage after a few hours of heavy tabbed browsing.

The result? Guys, Opera 9.6 really rocks. Performances are comparable to Webkit’s and the number of advanced features available is impressive.

Like Firefox, you can add a lot of third party addons and widgets which make your browser experience even better. Highly skinnable, a light but powerful RSS reader and email/newsgroup client is integrated, too. For example, look at how the Twitter widget looks like… nothing less than other powerful clients.

Another interesting advanced feature is the support for mouse gestures. You can easily perform many common operations without leaving your mouse, by just performing some easy gestures.

In addition, for users familiar with Google Chrome, a “speed dial” with thumbnails of  the most used websites is available.

Is it enough to make you switch? I’m currently using it and have to say I’m really impressed and I regret I haven’t tried it before. And, if you have a Mac and you are looking forward to try the Google browser, it can look like Chrome too!

To get more information about the new Opera 9.6, check the changelog out at this link.

Technorati Tags: browser, luca filigheddu, opera

Image via CrunchBase, source unknown

Ubiquity, the new Firefox extension released by Mozilla Labs really brings your browser to the next level. This is clearly another important sign that something huge is happening and we are moving to a digital world where the only app that you will need is your browser.

For those who use a Mac everyday Ubiquity is not really a news, since I guess everyone is familiar with the popular launcher QuickSilver. On the other hand, Ubiquity seems to be more integrated with the web, making many useful and popular web services much closer to the final users.

Here are two simple examples where I used Ubiquity to show me a map of Palo Alto and to show me a translation from italian to english:

I really like it and the ability to create new commands by users will make this a must have in any Firefox installation. What’s next?

You can install Ubiquity from this link.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Ubiquity Prototype Offers a Natural Language Web Command Line [Featured Firefox Extension]

Technorati Tags: Add-on, Aza Raskin, browser, firefox, luca filigheddu, mozilla, Mozilla Labs, Ubiquity, Web service