It’s no secret to WebProNews readers who have hit my articles from time to time that I’ve been a big fan of the Opera browser for years. Tabbed browsing and no IE worries have been enjoyable experiences with it.

I won’t even pretend to remember where I first heard that people tend to stick to a limited group of websites that they visit regularly. RSS feeds have probably had an impact on that for the more tech-savvy users, but plenty of people rely on good old bookmarks to get to their favorite places.

Opera has a beta version, 9.20, of its next browser available for testing. The clever folks in Oslo, Opera’s homebase, have added a new feature called Speed Dial to it for those repeat bookmarked site visitors.

Once Opera 9.20 has been installed, Speed Dial will become available in a tab. Click one of the nine boxes, and you have a choice of picking a frequently visited page, open pages, or a typed-in web address, to make one of the Speed Dial selections.

Speed Dial goes out and grabs a screenshot of the page, and displays it in the box. It’s similar to what you see when hovering the mouse pointer over a tab in Opera, where a thumbnail of the site appears.

Opening a new tab makes Speed Dial appear. Clicking a ‘Hide Speed Dial’ link puts it away, and a ‘Show Speed Dial’ link appears in the bottom right of a blank new tab page.

The Speed Dial feature is a nice little super-bookmark implementation, and having some frequently visited links available immediately does speed up browsing. I’ve already got mine populated with links.