Opera has launched a release candidate of Opera 9.5, the latest version of the company's web browser. Opera 9.5 has been in beta for several months, but the release candidate is a bit more stable, sports a few new features, and more importantly, a bunch of bug fixes. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Features a previously mentioned new skin
• Smoother upgrade from Opera 9.2 to 9.5
• "Download message bodies" enabled on all POP accounts
• Stability fixes
• Improvements to the Mac native skin and fixed support for Mac OS X 10.2

Unless major issues with Opera 9.5 RC are found, this version could eventually be marked a stable release. If you haven't tried Opera in a while, it's worth taking for a spin. While there are still a handful of sites and web services that don't render properly in Opera, (Google, we're looking at you), overall the browser is incredibly fast and full featured.