The second preview of Opera 9 is scheduled to be released on February 7, 2006, which will include BitTorrent and widgets support, said Daniel Goldman at Opera Watch.

Opera 9 integrates BitTorrent

Opera has teamed up with BitTorrent Inc. to include the BitTorrent protocol in the upcoming version of the Opera Web browser.

BitTorrent's technology will be made available to users of the Opera browser in two ways: first, users can search for torrent files in the Opera browser's integrated search field (the search will be done by BitTorrent.com's engine), and second, when a torrent file has been selected, Opera's Transfer Manager feature will handle the download.

Opera was the first mass-market browser to implement BitTorrent technology. In July of 2005, Opera released a preview version of its browser containing BitTorrent support, as first reported by Opera Watch.

Opera decided to add BitTorrent support during the release of Opera 8 last year. The massive response, with more than 100 downloads per second, dealt a technical knockout to Opera's servers.

With the BitTorrent addition to the Opera browser, it is still has the smallest download file size of all other major browsers. The BitTorrent support has only added another 24KB to the file size.

Opera 9 to add tab thumbnail images

According to Daniel Goldman, the unreleased Opera 9, currently in development, contains a new hover feature. When hovering over a tab, a thumbnail image of the tab (page/window) content is shown (see screenshot below).

Internet Explorer's (IE) latest preview release contains a similar feature, however, IE doesn't show the thumbnail image when hovering over the tab, it only displays the thumbnails of all open tabs in a single window.

Opera 9 tab thumbnail

Opera 9 will support Widgets

Back in November there was speculation that Opera 9 will add widget support. At that time (and now) an Opera spokesman wouldn't confirm anything to Opera Watch. However, multiple sources familiar with the development of Opera 9 have confirmed to me that Opera 9 will in fact have Widget support.

It's not entirely clear to me whether the widgets, which are small programs that use Opera's rendering engine, will run in the browser (sort of like Firefox's extensions) or whether they can also be run on the user's desktop outside of the browser. From the screenshots (see one of them below) that I have seen, it appears that the widgets will run inside of the Opera browser.

Is widgets Opera's answer to Firefox's popular extensions?

Opera 9 with the widgets option