Opera Introduces Speed Dial

[Mystic]

Bookmarks often fall into two categories:
A bunch of sites you bookmark because you may want to visit them again someday
5 or 6 sites you visit very often

Speed Dial is an elegant way to address the second category. When you open a new tab, it will often be to go to one of your favorite sites, so why not just show them there instead of an entirely blank page? Adding your favorites to Speed Dial is also very, very simple: Just click the button and choose a site from your Top 10 history or from the currently open tabs. Deleting them is just as simple, with the X in the upper right corner.

Cool stuff:

http://files.myopera.com/borg/desktopteam/speeddialsmall.png

You can reload all thumbnails by pressing Ctrl+R, giving you a quick overview of whether your favorite pages have changed, or just reload one of them from the right-click menu (nice for Web mail!).
We're partnering with Yahoo! on both Mobile and Desktop, which explains the new search field. You can of course configure it from search preferences.
You can drag links to thumbnails and even rearrange thumbnails by dragging them on top of each other.
You can hide the entire thing with the "Hide Speed Dial" button in the lower right corner if you don't like it.


Known issues:

Overrides your search.ini file instead of merging them: Make a backup before installing.
Thumbnails should not reload on every startup.
"Reload every..." is missing from the context menu.
Middle-click doesn't open pages in the background.
Back button doesn't go back to Speed Dial.
Several skin and display problems.
Contains some hardcoded not translatable strings.
The "What is Speed Dial" link doesn't go anywhere.
Forgetting to put your partner's blog in SD1 can have dramatic consequences :doh:


Changelog:

Fixed several crashes when printing, sending mail, removing active web panel...
Lots of minor fixes.
Start bar is replaced by Speed Dial, Top-10 and Bookmark buttons can be found in the Appearance dialog and added to other toolbars.
Canvas: Stopped drawing lines from origin (0, 0) when using path functions in accordance with changes in WHATWG canvas spec. Note to Widget developers: This may cause problems with your Widgets if you use Canvas.



Windows MSI (http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/o920w_8732m.exe)
Macintosh (http://snapshot.opera.com/mac/o920w_3630.dmg)
Unix (http://snapshot.opera.com/unix/Weekly-577/)
Source (http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/show.dml/785941)

Please note that this is an weekly build, intended only for testing.

[Submerge]

I like the idea, but wouldn't this affect a users bandwidth? It seems like it would delay anyone on a slower connection than just a blank page.

[Mystic]

I like the idea, but wouldn't this affect a users bandwidth? It seems like it would delay anyone on a slower connection than just a blank page.

Speed Dial is something that was originally concieved for Opera Mini (mobile phone browser).
Its just provides quick access to the bookmarks you use frequently. So, its just a bookmark with special hotkeys. Another thing is that opera saves thumbnails of pages saved on speed dial. This is again just a one time affair (ofcourse you can refresh the thumbnail later, if you want to).

[Submerge]

Ah, I see. It does indeed look very nice. I wonder how Opera will fair with their new product releases.

[Mystic]

Well more unique features will be added in v9.50 and v10.00 .

For me though Opera is already the best browser (most secure, most functional and also the fastest).

[aloksingh]

Opera is a very good browser. Maybe even a notch better than opera. I have started with this speed dial thing and it is very useful. Also, other opera widgets like comics and transalator are very good too.