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For your daily dose of Opera news head on over to Choose Opera. We still have our Facebook groups up and running: Opera browser and Opera Mini. For more information check out Choose Opera!

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We're happy to announce our upcoming release: Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta for Windows Mobile touchscreen devices.

The Opera Mobile 9.7 Beta will include many new great features. Read more in the Opera Mobile 9.7 blog.

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Betavine, a Vodafone Group R&D lab, is offering developers a chance to win £20,000* in a mobile widget competition.

Developers are invited to create widgets for the Opera for Mobile 9.5 platform, which is included on Nokia 6210, Nokia N78, Nokia N95 8gb and Nokia N96 devices.

Recources to get started

Have a look and use the following recources:

• Widgets SDK


• Opera Widgets forum


• Articles on mobile and cross-device development


• Widgets SDK tools


• Opera Dragonfly & Widget Emulator combo for debugging

Also check out Betavine's own "Get Started" page and the extensive Mobile Widgets User Experience Guidelines PDF document by Vodafone.

If this competition sounds like something for you, sign up at Betavine!

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Lifehacker has a nomination what's the best browser. We already have a good amount of Opera votes, but it's about time to get this show on the road!

Rally up and head over to Lifehacker and vote by commenting like this:

Click, click for voty: http://lifehacker.com/5175858/best-web-browser

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When did we release your favorite feature? Check out the Opera Version History!

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Opera loves speed, we all know that. We work hard to make the browser faster with features that speeds you up, but your connection also has a saying how fast you can go.

That’s why we’ve been working on Opera Turbo, a server-side optimization and compression technology that provides significant improvements in browsing speeds over limited-bandwidth connections by compressing network traffic. This does not only make you surf faster, but also lowers the cost of browsing when you are on a pay per usage plan.

Please not that Turbo is not for everyone. If you're on a 10Mbit fiber connection, you will most likely have no result of enabling Turbo mode. However, imagine you're stuck on an airport with a slow Wi-Fi connection... Well, fire up Turbo and experience improved browsing speed. :cool:

Turbo Speed

Today we start our time limited test phase for Opera Turbo. Please read the labs release to learn more about Turbo and download it. You can also see it in action in the following video:

Download Opera Turbo

• Windows build


• Mac build

If you like this, and think more people should know about Opera Turbo, please help Digg it!

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Opera has a wide selection of useful features. Some are hidden (link), others are visible. Let me demonstrate how CSS and Opera Dragonfly can be used to get rid of unwanted content (a.k.a. ads) on a website! This example is from LiveJournal, but you can do this on any site you like.

First, let's have a look on what we want to get rid off. The large banner on top marked in yellow:

Fire up Opera Dragonfly from "Tools" > "Advanced" > "Developer Tools"

Find the correct page in the list of open tabs. Select "DOM" in the top- and bottom tab. We are now ready to track down the element we want to hide. Make sure selected "Find element by clicking" is enabled (small icon with a pointer):

Opera Dragonfly will also mark the selection you are hovering. Click the content you want to hide. The content "id" is vital to what we're about to do:

• Open a notepad or another text editor.
  
• Type in the following:
  

• #ad-leaderboard { display: none; }



• Save the file as "livejournal.css"


• Close Opera Dragonfly

Since Opera allows you to add a CSS file to a specfic page, this style sheet is applied after all other styles are rendered. To do this, press F12 in Windows (or go through "Tools" > "Preferences" > "Advanced" > "Manage site preferences") and select "Edit site preferences":

Change the "site" box to livejournal.com. Go to the "Display" tab and change "My style sheet" to your saved "livejournal.css" we created earlier. ("C:\Program Files\Opera\usercss\livejournal.css" for me). Click OK and reload the page:

Enjoy! This approach is similar for removing other content on any page. Simply use Opera Dragonly to find the element

id

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We want to see how many on-topic comments one blog post can generate. To help a bit with the motivation we also get some sweet hardware gear if you wish to help us reach that goal.

All you have to do is comment in this post what you love about Opera. It's that simple. Everyone who comments will be entered in a random drawing to win epic hardware gear from Steelseries, who has been so kind to provide us with the goodies.

Remember, this is about mass participation. We've never received so many comments in a single blog post before, so please help promote this on your blog and other Web sites.

You can win this:

• SteelSeries 5Hv2: One of the most popular gaming headsets on the planet.


• SteelSeries QcK Heavy: The mouse pads are made of high quality cloth material, providing a precise and consistent glide.


• SteelSeries Ikari Laser: The result of 15 months extensive research of ergonomics, technology, shape, motion, hand grip and play styles by gamers.


• SteelSeries 7G: Sets new industry standards for gaming keyboards by allowing users to perform the most detailed and advanced key combinations to date.


• SteelSeries iron.lady Siberia (Pink!): Developed in co-operation with professional gamers to ensure that the soundscape, specifications and comfort is suitable for long gaming sessions.


• SteelSeries iron.lady bundle (Also pink!): A really cool pink version of the Ikari Laser mouse with a matching surface pad.


• SteelSeries Siberia Full-size Headset (red): Red version of the pink Iron Lady Siberia headset.


• SteelSeries Siberia Neckband Headset: The first professional headset to fully cover the users' ears, adding new levels of comfort to audio products.


• SteelSeries Experience I-2 (white): Quite possibly the classiest mouse pad in the world and was designed for gamers, graphics artists and others who use a mouse a lot


• SteelSeries S&S: SteelSeries S&S is a mouse pad researched and developed in co-operation with SK Gaming, one of the biggest organisations in eSport.

Rules:

To participate you have to post your comment in the competition post over at My Opera!

There are not many other rules to follow, except that you have to comment what you love about Opera. We will remove double posting, spam, trolling or flaming. We think you get the picture.

This contest will run for at least one week. If we haven't reached 1001 comments by next Monday (Feb. 16th) the prizes will get burned. Well, not burned, but we need to see 1001 comments in order to activate the hardware prize giveaway galore!

Ok, comment on!

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Today we introduce Opera Fingertouch, a technology designed to make interacting with the Web easier and simpler on touch-based devices. Opera Fingertouch provides visual feedback when you hit a Web link, and assists you when you come across multiple links or other selectable elements in close proximity to one another.

To see Opera Fingertouch in action today, download the new beta version of Opera Mobile for Symbian UiQ, check out the video demo below, or read the labs article.