Anigozanthos

Two posts in one day - and what a good reason!!!

With the release of version 9 of their browser, Opera Software have made as comparable a web technology leap from version 8, as they did from version 6 to 7.

Version 9 adds support for XSLT, XPath, Canvas (and started some Opera-specific 2d game canvas support), Audio, Web Forms 2, a lot of SVG Basic, full DOM2 support (to go with their full DOM1 and partial DOM3 support), NTLM, some CSS3 selectors, opacity, the new Netscape Plugin API, OCSP, contentEditable and designMode.

They've also fixed some long-standing bugs related to iframe z-index support, allowed fullscreen mode to fallback to screen media styles when no projection media styles are available, and fixed a printing bug where the screen media background colour would be printed.

Then there's the new opera:config, content blocking, site-specific preferences, widgets, BitTorrent, tab preview tooltips, custom searches, and SSL/TLS engine (security).

Oh yes, and Opera 9 is the first browser to get the Acid2 test completely correct! Correction: As mentioned by Kelson, Opera is the fourth browser to get it right, after Safari 2.0.2 (31-October-2005), iCab 3 (December-2005), and Konqueror 3.5.2 (28-March-2006). I'll rephrase it: Opera is the first Windows browser to get it right. ( Did I get that right? )


There's so many new features and bug fixes I've no doubt missed some!

It's pretty safe to say that Opera now has the best DOM implementation of any browser. It can also be argued that Opera has the best CSS support of any browser.

It's not perfect. There are a few regressions (one breaks the menus on my web site) and I'm sure the new features will have bugs, as all new features do. However, the benefits of the new features and the bugs that have been fixed far outweigh the drawbacks of having to put up with some new glitches.

The next web technology features I'd like to see supported are: overflow-x/overflow-y (mostly because IE and Firefox already support them), rgba/hsl/hsla colours, and complete CSS3 selectors. The new custom search function needs to be enhanced to support OpenSearch the same way Microsoft is making IE7 work.

It's very obvious from this release that Opera have devoted a huge amount of resources at building up the browser side of things. To those people who have whinged about Opera's integrated mail/news, IRC, BitTorrent, etc detracting from browser development - you have been proven wrong.

In fact, I believe it's time for Opera to give some love to the non-browser parts of Opera, their mail/news client in particular. Since the release of version 7 in Janurary 2003, it feels like only IMAP and newsfeed support has been added. I know that underneath Opera have made regular changes to the mail/news storage system in order to improve the reliability. Personally, I've had emails not turn up in searches, and contacts who have their emails mixed up with other contacts, etc.

These reliability issues really need to get sorted. Maybe the version 9 storage changes will have done that. I haven't been brave enough to trust my valuable emails to beta software, but now that version 9 has gone final, I'll be upgrading.

Probably the most requested addition to the mail client is rich text editing. I know there are people who hate the idea, and I'm not a big fan myself, but I strongly believe that it is inevitable. Sooner, rather than later. PGP/GPG support would be high on my list too.

Roll on version 10!