Kurt Cagle mirrors my own thoughts on the Opera 9 Preview (changelog).
Kurt, your code sample is white-on-white...
I agree Opera 9 Technical Preview is an impressive achievement by anyone's standards. I would have been impressed with only the improved SVG support but all the other stuff (Canvas2D, XSLT,WebForms 2.0, XPath, xml:id, etc) leaves me floored. I started my migration from Firefox to Opera this week. We'll see how it goes - my experiences might make for interesting reading...
SVG 1.2? Is there any news on whether SVG 1.2 spec itself has made any progress? I doubt Opera would release something that didn't have a spec in a final review state...