Andrew Gregory

Opera 10 Alpha

Saturday, December 6, 2008 2:07:29 AM

browsers, wishlist, opera

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

Two-and-a-half years ago (wow, is it that long ago?

) 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

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

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

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

Total: 40% - Fail

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

Dan Alexandrudantesoft # Saturday, December 6, 2008 2:14:38 AM

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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 2:55:31 AM

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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 3:03:32 AM

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

Andrew Gregory # Saturday, December 6, 2008 3:26:32 AM

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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 3:34:21 AM

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.

Robin ZalekBtEO # Saturday, December 6, 2008 3:51:50 AM

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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 8:51:31 AM

"Newsfeeds in panel: NO" .... uhm, YES, if you use mail
"Download manager: NO" ... hey, it can pause/resume and restart

"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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 11:38:03 AM

@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!

Simon Houstonshoust # Saturday, December 6, 2008 8:07:03 PM

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 # Saturday, December 6, 2008 8:32:01 PM

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

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)

Alexander Remenalexremen # Saturday, December 6, 2008 10:01:33 PM

@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/