Opera’s latest browser is out and it supports more cool stuff than either IE or Firefox. Best of all, they’ve ditched their old revenue model.

In a bid to gain some ground on giant Microsoft, Opera released the final version Tuesday of its upgraded browser, Opera 9, months ahead of its competitor, and promised to increase its marketing efforts in the United States.

Opera 9 includes widgets, or small web applications that sit on users’ desktops, and support for BitTorrent, a popular file distribution technology. The software also offers tabbed browsing (a longtime staple of Opera) and a choice of search engines.

The latest version also includes a security bar to prevent scams like phishing and a pop-up blocker to weed out annoying or potentially malicious pop-up windows, the company said. Opera had released a test version of the latest browser in April (see Opera Tests Browser Upgrade).

“For Opera 9, we worked hard to push the limits of what people expect from a web browser, with increased speed, new web standards support, and innovative features such as widgets and BitTorrent,” Jon S. von Tetzchner, chief executive of Opera Software, said in a statement… Source: Red Herring

[tags]phishing,browser,opera,distribution technology[/tags]