On Thursday, Opera Software ASA released version 9.50 beta 2 of its popular web browser.

The new version, a 14.3 megabyte download, adds the following fixes and changes:
-Full text history search is now part of the address field, with better results and better performance.
-Introduced a new security notification scheme in the address field; see Security.
-Added alternative tab-closing behaviors. The preferences now include the following options when closing a tab:
Activate the last active tab (default)
Activate the next tab
Activate first tab opened from current tab
-New spatial navigation highlighting, similar to the one used in Opera Mini 4 and the Wii browser.

Opera 9.27 requires Mac OS X 10.2 or later to run and is coded as a Universal Binary capable of running at native speeds on both PowerPC and Intel-based hardware.

If you've tried the new version and have any kind of feedback about it, let us know in the comments or forums.