Opera Software today made available their second technical preview of the upcoming version of the Opera browser. The two most fronted news seem to be support for AJAX widgets and bittorrent. A few widgets can be downloaded from a new section from the My Opera Community. There are not to many of them, but 2-3 of them are really good. The finale version of Opera 9 is not expected before the summer, so there should be plenty of time to get a decent amount of widgets ready, both for Opera and for third part developers.

Opera 9 with widgets

I found it just as important to see that CSS support had improved. Opera 9 TP 2 now almost passes the Web Standards Project‘s ACID 2 test, something it will surely do in it’s finale version.

Together with the new technical preview Opera today also opened http://labs.opera.com, and a list over the changes in the release can be found there. There will hopefully be lots of information added.

Verdict: Übercool!