Anigozanthos

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?

Daniel Goldman blogged for us to all say What would you like to see in the next Opera desktop browser?. This really isn't something to shove into a little blog comment - it deserves an entry all of its own!

CSS

• border-radius : Rounded corners are something people want now, and they're using ugly hacks with images to do it. The sooner more browsers support this property, the better.
  
• text-shadow : So cool! Just do it! Seriously, a little shadow goes a long way to making things look special. _{(Added in 9.50)}
  
• rgba/hsl/hsla : RGB is for computers, HSL is for people! HSL would make it so much easier to create colour-coordinated designs. Alpha support is needed for the same reason opacity support was needed. IMO, opacity is being pressed into use where alpha colours would make more sense. _{(hsl added in 9.50, rgba and hsla added in 10)}
  
• overflow-x/y : Mostly because IE and Firefox already support it. _{(Added in 9.50)}
  

M2 (Opera Mail)

• HTML composition - No, not something I particularly want, but it is an expected feature. This was waiting for Opera to support contentEditable/designMode type of functionality, which didn't exist until version 9. Now that that support has been added, putting in HTML emails shouldn't be a drama. _{(Added in 10)}
  
• Delete attachments.
  
• Read newsfeeds in a panel.
  
• PGP/GPG encryption.
  
• Better newsgroup support, eg multipart binary decoding.
  
• Threading needs a lot of improvement. Threads in my various emails and newsgroups always seem to be fragmenting all over the place! _{(This might have been added in 9.5x, 9.6x - I have seen some improvement)}
  

Other

• Roaming profile - I'm sure Opera will eventually make this a my.opera service. _{(Opera Link is a start on this)}
  
• Download manager - The ability to open more than one pipe to the same download, plus the ability to limit the bandwidth used by all the downloads.
  
• Able to download only some files in a torrent.
  
• DOM Inspector and JS debugger - there's already hints of a forthcoming JS debugger in opera:config, so that's good. They should each be available as panels too. _{(Dragonfly - Added in 9.50)}
  
• SVG-as-image support - the ability to use SVGs where ever GIFs, PNGs and JPGs can currently be used, i.e. in img elements, CSS, etc. _{(Added in 9.50)}
  
• MathML - I know there's some userJS to emulate support, but nothing beats native support! _{(Added in 9.50)}
  
• XBEL bookmark support
  
• Form filling could stand some improvement. Opera needs to keep track of field name -> field values, and keep all entered field values in a special entered values history.
  
• Default to native skin. I'm not a big fan of skins. Skinned apps never "fit in" with any other app and after a while just start looking untidy.
  
• Default to having a "Go" button. It would be one of the first things I'd remove, but it's an expected part of browser UI for new people. It should also be prettied up with a green triangle icon or similar.
  
• Chrome buttons with drop-down menus MUST have those little triangles that indicate the presence of those menus. On the current default web page navigation toolbar, the rewind, back, forward, and fast forward buttons are all missing those little triangles. Have little-trangle-less buttons available as a customization, but the default UI MUST HAVE THOSE TRIANGLES! _{(Added 11 July 2006)}
  

Not Wanted

• Extensions
  
• Update manager - I'm not convinced. Even on dialup, Opera's 4MB installer should take about 15min to download. Grab a coffee or something! _(Retracted)
  

I'll come back and update this entry as I think of things...