Skip navigation.

Opera 10 Alpha

, ,

:hat: A new toy to play with! Lots of bells, whistles, and shiny things to poke and prod! :love:

Two-and-a-half years ago (wow, is it that long ago? :eyes: ) I posted my Opera 10 Wish List. Many things have already been ticked off the lists. Most haven't.

CSS
  • border-radius: NO
  • text-shadow: YES
  • rgba/hsl/hsla: YES
  • overflow-x/y: YES
75% - Pass :up:

M2 (Opera Mail)
  • HTML composition: YES
  • Delete attachments: NO
  • Newsfeeds in panel: NO
  • PGP/GPG encryption: NO
  • Newgroup binary decoding: NO
  • Improved threading: YES
33% - Fail :down:

Other
  • Roaming profile: YES (mostly, Opera Link is a very good start)
  • Download manager: NO
  • Torrent sub-files: NO
  • DOM Inspector/JS debugger: YES
  • SVG as IMG: YES
  • MathML: YES (it's not fully supported, but it's useful)
  • XBEL bookmarks: NO
  • Improved form filling: NO
  • Default native skin: NO
  • Default Go button: NO
  • Drop-down indicators: NO
27% - Fail :down:

A little under one-and-a-half years ago, I followed that up with five more wishes:

  • Auto updates: YES
  • Skin/widget/panel/userjs updates: NO
  • BT UPnP+NAT traversal: NO
  • Plugin assistance: NO
  • Drop-down indicators: (duplicate from above)
25% - Fail :down:

Total: 40% - Fail :down: Not too good.

On balance, however, a couple of the items are big ones that have been asked for by a vast number of people: HTML email composition and automatic updates. Most of the rest of my wishes are smaller items requested by fewer people.

One very welcome addition not among my wishes is the inline spellchecker. Currently, the alpha includes a US English dictionary in the installer. However, I don't see that has being a generally feasible distribution method, unless, of course, Opera decide to return to a vast number of language-specific installers. I'd much rather see Opera distributed without any dictionaries, then have an install-on-demand system, preferably through download URLs to Opera's own servers.

I was thinking about producing a new wishlist, but there are enough NOs listed above that I don't see any point in adding more! Who knows? Opera are still working on version 10, maybe the beta will have some more items ticked off?

Quick, Write a Program!Opera Turbo and Internet Filtering

Comments

dantesoft 6. December 2008, 02:14

I like your wishlist.

CSS3 HSLA is enabled http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w100a1.html

unless, of course, Opera decide to return to a vast number of language-specific installers

They already do that, there are setups for many (interface) languages.

Andrew Gregory 6. December 2008, 02:55

Gee, you're quick! I've just fixed my hsla comment. I'd found a test on the web that looked OK and indicated Opera didn't support hsla. Closer inspection found the test to be faulty (it used integer rather than percentage values for the s and l components)!

TreeGo 6. December 2008, 03:03

What do you usually use for browsing and email, Andrew? Is it Opera exclusively?

Andrew Gregory 6. December 2008, 03:26

I use Opera for browsing as much as I can, and Firefox/IE/Safari only when I have to. However, I can't remember the last time I had to use Firefox/IE/Safari for anything other than testing web code.

For email, Opera is still my usual client, although now that I've switched to exclusively IMAP accounts, I sometimes use Outlook (2007), Thunderbird and VersaMail (PalmOS) as required. This year I've also started an archiving system, where I only keep a year's worth of email in my IMAP accounts, and store everything else in an offline archiver (MailStore Home).

Edit: I should mention the reason I use an offline archiver is that my IMAP accounts are currently limited by my ISP to storing 50MB each. I do not consider moving my emails to the "cloud" (eg Gmail or Yahoo) a viable option.

TreeGo 6. December 2008, 03:34

Thanks, Andrew.

I respect your opinion and contributions here and in the forums and newsgroups.

The stiffest competition I see for Opera right now performance-wise is with Chrome and its intensely fast rendering of Google applications and Yahoo Mail, for instance.

IE use is like wallowing in mud. FF always feels clunky and patched together with all the necessary extensions/addons to make it remotely as versatile as Opera. Safari is extremely limiting in many respects though its page-rendering is very quick like Chrome.

Opera 10 Alpha does seem a mite quicker than 9.62 but I frankly don't see much difference in that regard.

BtEO 6. December 2008, 03:51

Note that this alpha release is not intended to show off the full feature set of Opera. It is the first public release of the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which will be present in Opera 10, made available so you can start trying out some of the new web technology support. You need to use the Opera 10 alpha build to access the below examples, otherwise they won't work.

From Choose Opera.

serious 6. December 2008, 08:51

"Newsfeeds in panel: NO" .... uhm, YES, if you use mail
"Download manager: NO" ... hey, it can pause/resume and restart :wink:
"Improved form filling: NO" ... what about the spell checker?
"Default native skin: NO" ... it's three clicks away
"Default Go button: NO" ... shat should anybody need a go button? if you enter a url directly you are ten times faster hitting enter.
"XBEL bookmarks: NO" ... what for? every browser can read/write html bookmkarks

"Total: 40% - Fail Not too good." hey, the world doesn't spin around you.

Andrew Gregory 6. December 2008, 11:38

@serious: You should read my original list of wishes to put them in some context.

BTW, these are *my* wishes, nobody elses. They *do* spin around me! :D

shoust 6. December 2008, 20:07

Originally posted by Andrew:

Newsfeeds in panel: NO



Well YES, sort of, now that opera renders feeds as a preview page, you can simply bookmark one and show it as a panel.

I have planet opera as a feed right now showing in the panel.

serious 6. December 2008, 20:32

sry, I tend to jump to some conclusions too fast lately :wink:

but still, 40% isn't that bad. Also not to forget that it's not 40% overall rating, but 40% improvement. Also I read somewhere that there will be more features added until beta/final (imo it was on golem.de, but sometimes I'm not quite sure if you should trust those guys)

alexremen 6. December 2008, 22:01

@serious: you're right. The beta will contain more features. The alpha was mainly to show you guys our new rendering engine.

http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

scipio 8. December 2008, 21:31

Originally posted by Andrew:

Total: 40% - Fail :down: Not too good.

Hey, but you forgot to add weights to each item. Surely the missing Go button is a minor issue compared to Rich Text mail. :smile:

hallvors 15. December 2008, 16:50

Regarding "Improved threading" - now you can "follow" or "ignore" threads - does that count? :wink:

Andrew Gregory 16. December 2008, 09:20

For sure - "Improved threading" has had a YES from the start.

jazzman42 27. February 2009, 21:16

Hi just like to know when will Opera 10 be out of alpha

Write a comment

You must be logged in to write a comment. If you're not a registered member, please sign up.

Download Opera, the fastest and most secure browser
December 2009
S M T W T F S
November 2009January 2010
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31