Opera 11.50 Beta’s Speed Dial Gets Widgety

By  |  Tuesday, May 31, 2011 at 3:49 am

Opera Next–the auto-updating test edition of the next major version of the Norwegian Web browser–is out in a new version, 11.50. It has a clever addition to Speed Dial, the page of thumbnail links to favorite sites which has been widely imitated since Opera invented it: extensions. Rather than just depicting shrunken versions of sites you’ve saved, Speed Dial can now include widgety little applications, such as the weather one in the lower left-hand corner of the screen above.

Like most browser innovations, Speed Dial extensions will only be interesting if they gets embraced by developers, who’ll need to build them in large quantities. And it’ll be be most interesting if it turns into a standard, so that users of all browsers get to enjoy it, too. But if you like checking out nifty new Web concepts, it’s worth a peek right now. As is Opera in general–every time I revisit this browser, I wonder why it’s not more popular. (According to Google Analytics, only one percent of you use it to visit Technologizer.)

 
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3 Comments For This Post

  1. IT Rush Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 7:10 am

    Wow, hope to update my old version to this new one.. asap.

  2. @gpmoore Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 9:05 am

    "I wonder why it’s not more popular."

    Extensions. No Yoono, no x-marks and no ad-blocker that works as well as the ones in Chrome and Firefox. If it had those three (along with LastPass, which it does have an extension for), then I'd probably switch.

    I love the look of the thing. It performs very well on my desktop and they have a great mobile version.

    582 extensions as I write this and most of them are complete rubbish. I'm not a fanboy of any particular browser. If I didn't use extensions I'd probably just use IE9 and free up some disk space by using what's already on Windows, but without those little tools at my fingertips my browser feels in-complete.

  3. John Says:
    May 31st, 2011 at 9:59 am

    I have to agree. The plugins and add-ons available in firefox keep me
    comitted to it. I like Chrome’s speed, and the potential of Opera (I thought Unite was a great concept left undeveloped.) But, plugins are where it’s at.