Opera 9.20 is out and now is as good as a time as any for anyone who has never used Opera to give it a try.

9.20 introduces a couple of nice features I've been using for a while now in weekly and beta builds.

This most noteable addition is the Speed Dial feature.  When you open a new tab, instead being greeted with a blank page you'll see 9 large buttons that you can assign to 9 websites to quickly open them.  The buttons will show a preview of the website so they are easy to identify.

When the Speed Dial was introduced in the weekly builds there was the usual buzz of complaints from people who wish they could have Opera 9 with Opera 1 features only, but I think the feature is great.  I only use bookmarks for very few sites, and in most cases I give them a nickname so I can quickly type their nickname in the address bar instead of the full URL (i.e. 'da' instead of 'www.deviantart.com').  Using speed dial I don't need to use bookmarks at all.

Another supposed new feature is the Developers Tools.   It isn't technically a new feature of Opera 9.20 as it's just a AJAX page that can be used with all version of Opera 9.  9.20 just included a link to the tools.  The Developers Tools is Opera's answer to Firebug for Firefox.  I wouldn't suggest it is better than Firebug (I doubt it is), but it's functional, very useful and it works using just Javascript.  It makes the nature of plugins for Firefox seem silly, really.

The other feature I feel is very noteable is that Opera finally introduced the ability to automatically search when you've typed multiple words in the address bar.  Too often do I forget to type "g" before a search string in the address bar to search Google and end up at the Opera error page.  Not anymore and it's about time.

The thing that amazes me about Opera is that they constantly pack in bug fixes and new features with every new version and it still comes in under 5MB to download.