Believe it or not, but the first time I tried the Opera Web browser was a month ago. Until recently, I was content in calling Mozilla's Firefox the alternative browser. Opera 9 is now out and contains a wide range of features. Some of the features unique to Opera and not provided by Internet Explorer and Firefox includes BitTorrent built into the browser and Site Preferences. Site preferences allows you to accept cookies and pop-ups according to specific sites you're visiting (as opposed to settings for all sites you visit with the browser).
I thought eweek did a decent review of the product. The following are some of the things they had to say about Opera 9 in their article:
In our tests, we found Opera 9 to be one of the best Web browsing tools we've used in a long time, which is why we are giving Opera 9 an eWEEK Labs Analyst's Choice award.
Unlike Opera 8, which had significant browser interface changes, Opera 9's big changes are mainly in the areas of management and configuration options.
One of the coolest and most valuable new features in Opera 9 is its search customization feature. On any Web site to which we surfed with Opera 9, we could right-click in a search field and then choose to add the site's search engine to our list of integrated engines. We could even make it our default search engine. This is a feature that we have been looking for in browsers for a long time now, and Opera 9 has finally pulled it off.