Innuendo and out the other

As many probably already know, we released Opera 9.5 Alpha today.

Opera's BitTorrent implementation is never meant to replace external clients for people that use BitTorrent a lot. Our goal has always been to have an easily accessable and workable client for casual users of BitTorrent, eg. for downloading linux distributions, game trailers, etc.

In this post, I will talk a little bit about the addition of Peer Exchange support in the BitTorrent client. The changelog says "Added support for the BitTorrent peer exchange protocol, which is compatible with libtorrent and µTorrent".

The implementation in Opera is encapsulated into a extension protocol for BitTorrent, namely the one described in the extension protocol specification. The extension supported is "ut_pex" which is the peer exchange message sent by µTorrent, all clients based on libtorrent, KTorrent and many other clients. Azureus is using a different and incompatible message for peer exchange, so Opera 9.5 Alpha will not exchange any peers with this client.

The extension protocol seems to be the only relatively well designed solution for extending the protocol, and several clients already support this protocol and some of the extensions encapsulated in it.

Further improvements to the BitTorrent support is planned for Opera 9.5 final.

With the release of Opera 9 Technology Preview 2, a few new features related to search engines have been added. First of all, there is now an editor for editing, adding new and deleting search engines.

One feature that has also been added is the possibility to create a search on any website if that website has a search field. Creating a search will automatically generate the query string. If this form has multiple options, it will include whatever has been typed into the form in the search.



In this particular example, I had selected "Tom's hardware" in the dropdown box, so when I select to create a search, a edit window comes up prefilled with all values necessary to use the search.



When you want to do a search with this recently added search engine, you just type into the addressbar using the shortcut you assigned to it.



The newly added search will also be available in the search field that is next to the address bar.



A search editor has been added to the preferences that allows you to edit existing search engines.



We hope this will make it much easier to use the search engines in Opera and make this powerful feature more accessible.