Having heard the fanfare about Opera 9.5 going into beta, I wasn’t that excited about it, till I heard enhanced compatibility with historically-problematic sites for Opera was a focus point.

Sites like Google Docs. Google Notebook, which behaves like a screenshot in Opera 9.23. And Zoho suite, which I’m using a lot more of increasingly.

So it made sense to take the plunge.

The good news is, Google Notebook now works with 9.5. Zoho looks much better too, especially Zoho Notebook which was previously rather buggy for me.

Unfortunately, the bug with Google Reader is still there, where embedded videos get ’stuck’ on the screen, even when you scroll down.

A seemingly-subtle improvement that is making a lot of difference for me is that scrolling is much smoother and comfortable now. I wouldn’t call scrolling before jerky per se, but it did make my eyes a little blurry, what with all the reading (and scrolling) I do everyday.

By the way, I foolishly searched online for instructions to migrate all my old settings from Opera 9.23 to 9.5, to no avail. The obvious solution which I missed was to just install the new one in the old directory (select ‘custom’ during the 9.5 installation process to change this, or it’ll go into its own directory) and everything gets ported over, no fuss no muss.