In September, Google said it hoped to bring its then-new Google Instant search feature to users of the Opera browser "shortly." A half-year later, there's still no sign of it.

Google still is working on it, though.

"We've encountered some technical barriers that are temporarily preventing us from making Instant available for Opera," Google said in a statement yesterday. "It's difficult for us to estimate when we will overcome these barriers, but we want to bring Instant to as many browsers, platforms and regions as possible."

It's not clear exactly what those glitches are. Opera fans are able to use Google Instant by setting their browser to lie about its identity and tell Web servers it's Firefox, so clearly the feature isn't totally impossible.

Opera, based in Oslo, Norway, long has had a loyal following of passionate users, and the browser maker has often been eager to embrace new Web technologies, so being stuck in a tech backwater clearly is frustrating to some users.

Opera is continuing to advance its browser. New features emerging in a beta of Opera 11.10, code-named Barracuda, include support for several new standards. You can download Opera 11.10 beta for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Among them:

&149' the Web Open Font Format, an attempt to bring better typography to the Web via downloadable fonts.

&149' CSS's linear gradients, which can create gradual color transitions and fades without requiring images to be downloaded.

&149' CSS's multi-column layouts to make it easier to provide newspaper- or magazine-like look to Web pages.

Separately, Opera is working on adding hardware acceleration and WebGL's 3D graphics to a future version of Opera. Also in the works is the HTML5 parser, which among other things defines a standard way for all browsers to handle the abundance of incorrectly coded Web pages.