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Technical preview 2 of Opera 9 code named "Merlin" was released today by Opera. Arve Bersvendsen has an excellent summary of features and screen shots here. Also, Tim Altman, an Opera developer, has a rich summary of Opera 9 features here.

Just to provide a quick summary Opera 9 includes the following features;

* Widgets - these are small web applications like clocks, weather, sports scores which run outside the browser and are cross platform which means you can run them under Windows, Linux, and MAC OS X.

* Content Blocking - in Opera 9 you can right click on any web page and select "block content" to stop external images or flash movies from loading.

* BitTorrent - this is the peer-to-peer file transfer utility. According to WebProNews, the Transfer Manager in Opera used to handle downloads will also handle the BitTorrent file transfers. "Implementing BitTorrent is a natural choice, considering its efficient use of bandwidth and worldwide popularity. For users this means that they can browse and download content in an application they're familiar with," Christen Krogh, Opera VP of Engineering, said in a statement.

Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent's president, waxed effusive about Opera's integration of BitTorrent and its collaboration with Bram Cohen, who created the file sharing technology. "With BitTorrent Search, Opera will be offering its users a seamless experience for discovering and downloading large files from the thousands of BitTorrent publishers around the world," he said.

BitTorrent speeds up the process of downloading large files through the clients that use it. Each client that downloads a file makes that file available for uploading back to the Internet, where other users can download it.

By bringing a number of clients into play, a torrent file downloads from multiple sources. Instead of one file coming from a single source, subject to the limitations of that site, smaller chunks of the file download can generally be downloaded faster.

Other improvements in Opera 9 include;

* Updated source viewer which includes syntax highlights

* Customizable searches

* Site-specific preferences

Also, Opera has taken a page, apparently, out of Google's playbook by tagging the web page for the preview edition of Opera 9 as "Opera Labs." As most readers know Google has a separate web page for newly emerging applications called Google Labs. Opera is now featuring its new technologies the same way. Check it out here.