Opera 9.5 Alpha is so fast that you might get a speeding ticket when you use it.
Ars Technica did some testing and in their tests Opera 9.5 Alpha averaged 50% faster than Firefox and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista.
But Opera 9.5 Alpha isn't just about speed. It has many new features.
It has improved CSS rendering capabilities, including support of CSS 3. There is also improved content blocking options, improved site compatibility, performance improvements, improved content blocking options, better platform integration, full history search and more.
The full history search is nothing short of amazing. Most browser history searches look at the URLs and sometimes they will look at the titles of pages you have visited. With Opera 9.5 Alpha the full history search searches the actual content of the pages you visited in order to give you your results.
There are big improvements to the built-in mail client.
You will find a content menu option that will let you open the current page in any other browser on your system.
Bookmarks synchronization will let you copy all your bookmarks to a server and then makes it possible for you to synchronize multiple browsers with that server-stored copy.
Another feature allows you to restore a window if you accidentally closed it.
I don't think the Opera browser ever gets the attention that it deserves.
This is an alpha version so there are some bugs, as should be expected. Opera has not said when the final version of Opera 9.5 will be released.
Opera 9.5 Alpha is available for Windows, Mac and Unix. Here is the link
Opera Web Browser