Confessions of a Web Developer

After a long wait, Opera 10 is out! So what's new in this first double-digit web browser?

Turbo

The biggest new feature is Opera Turbo, which can massively speed up web access on a slow network connection. Turbo takes the compression used for Opera Mini, which has to deal with slow cell phone networks, and brings it to the desktop. On fast connections you won't need the proxy, but if you're stuck on dial-up or sharing a busy network, it can help immensely.

I definitely could have used it on the painfully slow hotel wi-fi during Comic-Con!

Turbo can be turned on and off through the status bar, or set to auto-detect your network speed and switch on when it would help, and off when it's not needed.

Speed

Even without Turbo, Opera 10 is a heck of a lot faster than Opera 9 was! The app itself is a lot snappier, it displays pages faster, and it responds quickly. Opera feels lighter than Firefox again, after the (comparatively) clunky 9.x series.

Web Fonts

Opera's CTO recommended embedding TrueType fonts with CSS in 2007, but Safari was the first web browser to support it in a non-beta release. Now Firefox, Safari and Opera can all download fonts as-needed. That means websites can use fonts that aren't already installed on your computer.

Until now, if a designer wanted to use a font other than one of the standard fonts that come pre-installed with Windows or Mac OS, they had to save the text as an image. That's fine for banners and the like, but a pain for anything that changes regularly...like headlines or content.

You can read more about web fonts at Mozilla Hacks, and see them in action at Speed Force (font write-up).

Site Compatibility & Features

Website compatibility has improved a lot, and Opera has continued to add support for newer technologies. It's great to see Opera, Chrome, Safari and Firefox all working toward the next generation of the web. (If only Internet Explorer were along for the ride - at least IE8 has finally caught up with the last generation.)

Spell-Check

Opera has had on-demand spell checking for a while, though on Windows you had to install a separate dictionary. Now it's built-in, and it'll underline misspelled words as you type. (Downside: it underlines inside HTML code. I don't really want to add "href," "li," and so forth to my dictionary.)

Unite Postponed

One thing Opera 10 doesn't have that was introduced in the pre-10 snapshots is Opera Unite, which lets you set up a presence on your computer that other people can see for file sharing, social networking, etc. Apparently they decided it needed more work and didn't want to hold up the release.

But Wait, There's More!

Some other new features:

• Visual tabs: Stretch out the tab bar and see a thumbnail of each page you have open.
• New e-mail client, including the long-requested ability to compose with formatting.
• Automatic update.
• Customize Speed Dial.
• Web apps integration with web-based email and feed readers.
• Improved developer tools (Dragonfly).
• Opera Link: synchronize bookmarks, history, notes, etc. across multiple computers and phones. (Not new, but I think it syncs more types of data than it used to)

And a lot more.

As a reminder: Opera is free (as in beer). It has been for almost 4 years now, but it's worth repeating because every once in a while you see someone who thinks it's still pay or ad-based software.

(Reposted from K-Squared Ramblings)

Now there’s timing: Just two days after I bought a T-Mobile G1, Opera has released a beta of Opera Mini for the Android platform. You can find it in the Communications section of the Android Marketplace. Amazingly enough, on its first (or is that second?) day out, it’s already #2 by popularity.

For the most part I’m happy with the built-in browser, except for some sites that don’t translate well to the small screen. Sometimes panning & zooming isn’t the best solution, but that’s the only solution on the default browser as near as I can tell. Opera Mini gives you the option of choosing a “Mobile view” which will reformat the page.

It’s a bit rough around the edges (but then it is still a beta). In particular, the touch screen sometimes works for following links, and sometimes I have to use the track ball. Also text entry is a bit inconsistent: when you navigate to a URL, you can finish by hitting Enter, but when you fill in a single-line form field (say, a username), Enter takes you to a new line. You have to hit the Menu button to get an OK/Cancel dialog. And passwords remain completely visible, rather than obfuscating to dots one character at a time.

Of course it’s always good to have alternatives, plus it’s got the mobile display option and it’s blazing fast. It was designed to deliver performance over slower networks, after all (by compressing the heck out of everything at a proxy), so on the 3G network it just screams.

(Reposted from K-Squared Ramblings)

So, Gears is now available for Safari on Mac OS X. Assuming I haven't missed anything, that means Google's offline application API is available on:

• Firefox on Windows, Mac and 32-bit Linux (and other Gecko browsers if you jump through some hoops)
• IE on Windows & Windows Mobile.
• Safari on Mac
• Chrome on Windows

Conspicuously missing at this time:

• Opera
• 64-bit Linux
• Chrome on Linux & Mac
• Safari on Windows

I expect all of these are on their way, however. Opera issued a press release back in May about upcoming Gears support, though it's been quiet on the subject since then. Google has stated their intentions to expand Chrome to Linux and Mac, and there's no way that they'll leave Gears out of their own browser. And it's obvious that 64-bit systems are the wave of the future.

The only one I'm not sure of at this point is Safari on Windows, though it certainly seems likely. The silence on the Opera front has been frustrating, though I wouldn't be surprised to see built-in Gears support in Opera 10.

Having just upgraded my home Linux box to a 64-bit system this weekend, I'm kind of hoping that 64bit Linux support will show up sometime soon. Though I suppose I'll have to try the nspluginwrapper workaround.

I've posted my first impressions of Chrome, Google's new web browser, after trying it out for a few hours.

California is experiencing drought conditions again, and the media and PR campaigns have finally taken notice. I've posted an article, "Oh, You Mean This Drought!" over at my main blog, looking back at my memories of the mid-1980s drought, and how we seem to have forgotten how to conserve water over the years. Most of the tips being suggested today are the same things I remember hearing 20 years ago.

Read more...

Timed for Blog Action Day. Since I heard about the event here on the My Opera Community, I figured I ought to mention the actual post here.

I've been away from this corner of the web for a month or so, focusing on the upheaval in comics fandom with The Flash, so I don't know if anyone's tagged me for Opera Watch's 5 things I’d like to see in Opera meme.

So I'm just going to throw my hat in the ring before I head off to Comic-Con tomorrow.

1. Inline spell-check and other improvements. Yeah, on-demand spell-check is available, but it's so much more convenient to have problem words highlighted as you type. I'd also like to see an "Ignore All" button, in case I don't want to teach the spell checker a word that appears repeatedly in a post. And it would be great if it would recognize and skip URLs and HTML/BBCode tags. I get really tired of hitting "Ignore" on things like href and http, but I don't want add them to the dictionary in case I accidentally type them in the body of a post.

2. Apt and Yum repositories for Linux. Opera's Linux offerings break down to about half a dozen binaries, which are available in 3 forms: .rpm, .deb, and tar.gz. Opera doesn't have to provide a separate repository for each distribution, just one yum repo for each .rpm, and one apt repo for each .deb. Once the user installs the repository, the OS's own update system will be able to take care of updating Opera. (As an example, see what Adobe has started doing with its yum repository for Flash.)

3. Delete all cookies on close with site-specific exceptions. I've given up trying to figure out what overrides what in Opera's cookie settings. What I'd like to do is just wipe everything on exit, with a list of sites that are allowed to keep cookies across sessions. Firefox does this with the "Keep until... I close Firefox" setting. I can sort of manage it in Opera by telling it to delete all new cookies when exiting, but it's more of a pain to add a new site. Instead of just adding it to the list of exceptions, I have to disable the option, log in to the site, then re-enable it. And that's assuming the site doesn't have to update the cookie later on.

4. Experimental CSS3 properties, especially box-shadow and border-radius. I know Opera 9.5 is supposed to have a bunch of CSS3 capabilities, but so far they've been cagey on just what's on the list.

5. Wii emulator mode for the desktop version. I'm not likely to pick up a Wii, but I'd like to make sure my websites look right. Small-screen rendering is great for simulating mobile devices, and the Opera Mini simulator takes care of that platform, but I can only go on descriptions for the Wii version.

I'm not big on the whole tagging thing, so I won't tag anyone else. (Besides, most of the people I could think of have probably already posted by now.)

(On the subject of Comic-Con, I'll be posting about it at my main site, K-Squared Ramblings, and guest-blogging at Comics Should Be Good.)

Haarvard just posted how to create a link to preview a site in the Opera Mini simulator. This is great for sites that want to spread awareness of Opera Mini, but it would also be very useful for web development. The link structure is simple enough, I realized it would be easy to create a bookmarklet.

I have one here. I wanted to create it as a link, so you could just drag it to your personal bar, but the blog software doesn't allow JavaScript links. (That's probably for the best, safety-wise, since allowing them could open the site up to cross-site scripting vulnerabilities.)

So, what you'll have to do is add a new bookmark, name it "View in Opera Mini" and paste the following into the address field:

javascript:location.href='http://www.operamini.com/demo/?url='+document.location.href;

I've tested this with both Opera and Firefox. It should probably work with IE and Safari as well. Basically anything that supports both Java and JavaScript, and allows JavaScript bookmarks.

A while back I wrote a post on adding an Opera button to WordPress using your blogroll. It turns out there's much easier way to do it on WordPress.com, using sidebar widgets.

If you are using a widget-capable theme:

1. Go to the Presentation tab on your blog's dashboard, then click on Sidebar Widgets.
2. Drag a Text widget to the sidebar, then click on Configure.
3. Load another tab or window and open the Choose Opera: Banners and Buttons page.
4. Copy the code from the banner you want, then paste it into the text widget box.
5. Close the widget configuration box, then hit Save changes.

Much easier!

Yahoo! just announced an update to their system of Graded Browser Support. This is the scheme where they classify browsers according to capabilities, age, user base.

• A-Grade browsers get full support. Yahoo does extensive testing, and tries to make services work well in them.
• C-Grade browsers are known to have problems, and get sent "lowest-common denominator" code. When last checked, the only C-Grade browser was IE 5.0.
• X-Grade browsers are everything else. They get the same code as A-Grade browsers, but Yahoo doesn't do any testing on them.

A few months ago, they added Opera 9 on Windows XP to their A-Grade list (replacing Opera 8).

This time around, they've made several interesting changes:

• Expanded A-list support for Opera 9 across all operating systems they support, including Mac OS and older Windows releases.
• Added IE7 and Firefox 2 to the A-list.
• Dropped IE 5.5 and Firefox 1.0 from A-list to X-list.
• Dropped Netscape from A-list to X-list.

The first item is most significant for Opera users, because it brings Yahoo's official policy on Opera support up to the same level as their support for Firefox.

The new chart only shows A-grade browsers, so it's not clear whether IE 5.0 is still supported at C-grade level or dropped to X-grade like IE 5.5. This may reflect support at Microsoft, which maintains support for IE 5.0 on Windows 2000, but not IE 5.5. You can't even download IE 5.5 from Microsoft anymore. You can get IE 5.0 by installing Windows 2000, and you can update to IE6 or download the installer, but you can't update to or download IE 5.5.

The fact that they've dropped Netscape is interesting, and represents another nail in the coffin of the web's former dominant player. Of course, the real action moved from Netscape to Mozilla years ago.