ODIN Blog

Today, we've released a pre-alpha version of Opera 10.5 on Opera Labs. Download it and give it a spin. Let us know what you think about it too!

Let's give you the lowdown on what's new in this build. Hang on tight, there's a lot of new stuff here!

Carakan - Our fastest JavaScript engine yet

This build introduces Carakan, our upcoming JavaScript engine. We're working on making it the fastest in the world and already you can see that it's pretty speedy! As you can tell from the above graph, Carakan has boosted our performance greatly compared to our previous JavaScript engine. The speed superiority is mostly evident if you test the Windows build, as we haven't started on optimization for Mac yet. Modern web applications are increasingly using JavaScript in much more complex ways, which need faster and more efficient JavaScript engines from browsers. Carakan promises to run JavaScript faster than ever, allowing modern web apps to run smoother than before. Bruce Lawson wrote a good overview of Carakan a few months ago and you can also read the Core Concerns blog post about Carakan and an older post on it too, for more details on the concepts behind it.

One more thing to note is that much work is ongoing to support the new ECMAScript Standard, ES5. One of the main things about ES5 is native JSON support, which we now have in our new JS engine. Hallvord Steen has written about it in more detail in his post on the Core Concerns Blog.

Vega - Our new graphics library

We initially wanted to just have a library for displaying SVG, but we gradually expanded it to support other graphics such as <canvas> etc. It enables greatly improved performance for complex graphics, and can even use a hardware accelerated back-end. You can read the Opera Core Concerns Blog post on Vega for more information on it. Along with displaying SVG, Vega is now used for all graphics rendering in Opera. This allows us to do transitions and transforms in CSS, but also things like rounded corners, box shadow etc. You'll notice small animations when opening/closing a tab, when alerts appear and when you drag tabs too, all of which are also achieved through Vega.

Presto 2.5 - Our latest rendering engine with even greater support for web standards

This build features Presto version 2.5 (the one in Opera 10.10 final is Presto 2.2) which is the newest version of our core rendering engine. Besides having the most complete CSS 2.1 implementation (it even supports visibility: collapse which was missing until now), it also has the latest support for many of the new CSS3 and HTML5 properties. Let's take a look at some of what developers should look forward to with this engine.

Rounded corners with border-radius

All web designers will love this! Using the CSS3 border-radius property, you can have rounded corners on your page without the need for images or any other similar workarounds. Check out Patrick's border-radius demo and Vadim's take on it for more rounded corner goodness.

Backgrounds and Borders

Presto 2.5 supports many of the W3C's Backgrounds and Borders Specification. Check out Zi Bin and Vadim's Dev.Opera article on Backgrounds and Borders (including the aforementioned border-radius) together with some nice demos which you can try in the build.

CSS3 Transforms and Transitions

Transitions basically transition from one state to another over time, while transforms can apply various functions such as translate (move), rotate, scale, etc. David has written a Dev Opera article on CSS3 transforms and transitions and has made a neat demo demonstrating it too.

Offline Storage and more

Presto 2.5 has support for both Web Storage and Web SQL databases. In Web Storage, you have the option to store the data temporarily (session storage) or for a longer time using local storage, which will store data until you explicitly clear it. Web SQL gives you the ability to create databases on the user's machine (using SQLite as a backend) so that you can store data in a more structured manner and even query it using SQL. Check out this example page demonstrating Web Storage and this example page showing Web SQL Database storage.

Other browser features

• Private browsing: Open a new private window or a private tab. Christmas time is near, you might want to go online to buy a few gifts for your loved ones without them noticing which sites you went to.
• Better integration with native systems: This means better integration on Windows 7 (Aero Glass, Aero Peeks and Jumplists), and a move to Cocoa on the Mac, where we have a unified toolbar, touch pad gestures and drop down menus. It also adds notification features, in particular 'Growl' notification support on the Mac.
• You'll also notice that all notification messages are now non-modal. Which means that it will not impede your workflow by having a child window that you have to click to go on with your job.
• Further improvements to the search box and the address box. Now its even easier to search right from the address box.
• Type opera:cache in your address bar for an all new interface to your cache. It allows you to directly browse, preview and use the contents of the cache on a per site basis.
• Opera Dragonfly in 10.5 pre-alpha features new and improved highlighting for clicking and selecting elements to inspect on a page. To open Opera Dragonfly, go to Tools->Advanced->Developer Tools.
• New inline page search and password manager.

And much more. Download it and test it out. This is a pre-alpha release, so there may be issues encountered (especially related to media queries and web fonts). There are certain things like Opera Unite and the new widgets implementation (which we introduced in 10.20 alpha) which are not included in this build. One more thing to be noted is that the demos will work best on Windows for the moment, as right now we have done optimizations only for that platform. Also, there is no Linux build for 10.5 pre-alpha right now. However, we're working on having optimized versions for all major platforms as well as adding even more new exciting stuff for the alpha, beta and the final versions.

Zi Bin and I had a wonderful two weeks touring Indonesian Universities with Putri. We visited 10 Universities in five cities and spoke to 2500 students.

My talk is available on Slideshare:

The resources that I demoed were

• canvas first-person shooter
• canvas first-person gifter
• Filament Group's jQuery plugin for graphing data tables
• My HTML5 forms demo, including range, date, regex validation
• CSS Media Queries demo - try slowly reducing the width of the browser

You can also download Opera Desktop which I was using to demo, and which includes Opera Unite, Opera Turbo and Opera Dragonfly.

Opera Developer Network has some beginner's canvas tutorials available:

1. HTML 5 canvas - the basics
2. Creating an HTML 5 canvas painting application
3. Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting
4. Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting: Part 2

Some other useful resources:

• HTML5 validator
• HTML5 outliner
• the author's version of the HTML5 specification (much shorter than the main version and generated from the same source, but without all the parsing rules and algorithms for browser manufacturers and other implementors)
• HTML5 Doctor (I'm a co-curator of this site)
• SVG vs. Canvas on Trivial Drawing Application: a comparison of canvas and SVG
• An article called Designing a blog with HTML that covers some 0of the new HTML5 markup elements. (Two articles on my personal blog cover it in much more detail: Redesigning with HTML 5 and WAI-ARIA and Marking up a blog with HTML 5 (part 2).)

You can see the team blog as we went:

1. First Seminar in Indonesia Uni Tour
2. Sepuluh Nophember Institute of Technology, Surabaya
3. Gunadarma University - Depok
4. University of Indonesia & Meet-up @Wetiga
5. We are the celebrities!
6. "Bandung Bagus!"
7. Yogyakarta, 23rd November 2009

Zi Bin's presentation is also available:

On Monday this week, we released the final version of Opera 10.10 for desktop, with Opera Unite as its main highlight. Gautam gave a fine description on the Opera Unite blog last week:

Opera Unite establishes your personal computer as a Web server. You are given a URL similar to http://devicename.username.operaunite.com/. You can have as many computers as you like, and each is linked to your username. This way people can find the real you. The unique you, physically on your own computer. Possibly at home, work, or at the coffee shop.

That unique you could be running one or more of the preinstalled or downloadable Opera Unite applications, or perhaps an app you built yourself. Note that we’re giving away prizes for new Opera Unite apps, so let all your creativity loose :-)

Quick links to some of the documentation we have prepped for you thus far:

• Introducing Opera Unite in Opera 10.10
• Opera Unite developer’s primer — revisited
• Yusef: the Unite Server Framework
• Rapid application development using the Opera Unite Yusef library
• Hello Yusef example Opera Unite application

You’ll find more articles in the Opera Unite section on Dev.Opera, and we’re also working on updating the Libraries overview so as to include Yusef and the various plugins. Stay tuned for more!

And now for the second half of this story — on Wednesday (some speculate that we never sleep) we released Opera 10.2 alpha, featuring Opera Widgets for Desktop. This release allows you to install and run widgets as standalone applications.

In other words, you can now build cross-platform applications for Windows, Mac, and Linux using Web standards, which is a very powerful concept. If you want to get started, have a look at Remigiusz’s Opera Widgets as standalone applications article.

So, lots of new stuff to play with — let us know what you think!