Daniel Hendrycks - 10.5 Pre-Alpha Predictions (Nothing special)

10.5 Pre-Alpha Predictions (Nothing special)

Saturday, December 19, 2009 7:46:18 PM

What a beautiful picture, it was created by Oleg Melnichuck.

Anyway, here are my predictions for the Opera 10.5 pre-alpha release on Tuesday, December 22nd. These are not bizarre or new expectations.

Presto 2.5- Not 2.4 as many believe, an employee even confirmed it. It also makes sense that it is not Presto 2.4, after all, Opera Mobile 10 Beta uses Presto 2.4. If 2.4 was supposed to be released in 10.5 Opera Mobile would not be finalized for a very long time.
Carakan- The new JavaScript engine that I expect to surpass Chrome's engine in speed. Although it is most likely incomplete (and eats more RAM) it would certainly be fun to take for a spin. My evidence lies from a quote from the Opera Desktop Team (the keyword is: speed. ) and a tweet from an employee indicating Opera 10.5 is 4x faster at an ECMAScript benchmark which is what Carakan is supposed to improve on.
Vega- This will be the render of the Opera UI and the webpages. Since this takes advantage of Harware Acceleration we will see smoother animations and faster page loading to too.
New Look- Jon Hicks (Senior Designer) has posted tweets which probably mean that he has been working on a design for 10.5. This will most likely take at least some advantage of Vega so the GUI can be smoother and shinier. This is what I am most excited for this pre-alpha. Sadly, I have to wait.
Standards Improvements- I predict more SVG implemented ~~and some WebGL. The link given in the title of this bullet has a quote I found interesting. "Opera has started implementing WebGL, too, said Tim Johansson, Opera's lead graphics developer."~~ We might even see some Ogg!

There you have it, those are my predictions for this coming Tuesday. Can't wait to open this present!

Update: I scratched-out the WebGL part. I think that will be in a separate labs build instead.

MOTWMerry Christmas!

Comments

Alexodius PrimeAleksOD # Sunday, December 20, 2009 12:51:57 AM

Nice. I also expect widgets to run separately from Opera, judging by their weekly builds.

Also, maybe there is a Private Browsing Mode, or something similar.

lucideer # Sunday, December 20, 2009 1:33:52 AM

Originally posted by DanielHendrycks:

I predict more SVG implemented

Just out of curiosity, are there some specific comments from devs that have motivated this prediction or is it idle speculation.

The reason I ask is I'm very curious as to what exactly this might be, Opera has almost 100% SVG 1.1 compliance so there's very few things to be improved. However, Opera's current support for SVG foreignObject is very poor (here's an svg example that barely works at all in Opera, but displays well enough in Firefox/Chrome) and if I understand it correctly, foreignObject should operate better in Vega (as the same engine is rendering html and svg). Fingers crossed.

Daniel HendrycksDanielHendrycks # Sunday, December 20, 2009 3:04:46 AM

Originally posted by lucideer:

Just out of curiosity, are there some specific comments from devs that have motivated this prediction or is it idle speculation.

Nope, they are just passionate about SVG like I am. I am sure in these future versions of Presto they have more of SVG implemented. (I also just started getting interested in WebGL. And today I read that they are implementing it. Having re-examined that possibility, I am going to scratch-out the WebGL part. I do think we will get that in a Labs release instead like Ogg was.)

Originally posted by lucideer:

Opera has almost 100%

93.89% to be exact *pushes up glasses and snorts*

Originally posted by Alexei:

Also, maybe there is a Private Browsing Mode, or something similar.

Ah, I forgot about that. Although I am not expecting that.

lucideer # Sunday, December 20, 2009 3:17:18 AM

Originally posted by DanielHendrycks:

Having re-examined that possibility, I am going to scratch-out the WebGL part. I do think we will get that in a Labs release instead like Ogg was.

I don't know - we already had a labs release of WebGL, it just wasn't called WebGL back then (it was called 3D Canvas). I think it's a possibility that we'll see this soon enough (if not in 10.5), especially since we're getting hardware acceleration, which this would need.

Think about this - CSS transitions were proposed for standardisation in March - and they were in Presto 2.3 (released 8th Sep) - WebGL was proposed for standardisation 10 days ago, so that gives us... June?

Originally posted by DanielHendrycks:

93.89% to be exact *pushes up glasses and snorts*

Meh, close enough. I think paint servers are the biggest part of that, and they're not really that great - they're kinda like more complex versions of CSS background images for SVG.

Originally posted by DanielHendrycks: