Tweak

One of the news items last week: Mozilla Firefox wants to speed up their release schedule. Apparently they plan to release not just Firefox 4 this year, but also Firefox 5, 6 and 7! They are spurred on by Chrome of course, which is getting out its feature upgrades at breakneck speed. Though I suspect many Chrome users hardly notice - one of the disadvantages of Chrome's silent upgrades is that users are not aware that they are using a newer version with new features

I think that the people who read my blog will be aware that, while Opera still uses rather classical version numbers, we've already moved to a schedule of multiple feature releases in a year. Quite different from the 'almost once a year' releases that Firefox manages, never mind the (recent) two-yearly schedule of Internet Explorer (wikipedia). Here's an overview of the last 5 years of Opera releases:

Version	Date	Cool features (add "tons of fixes" to each cell yourself)
Opera 11.50	2011	Speed Dial extensions; Password sync. Core 2.9: more HTML 5 support
Opera 11.10	April 2011	Speed Dial changes; URL Filter API; Plugin install wizard; Special use IMAP folders support; Core 2.8: CSS 3 Multicol, CSS 3 Viewport, CSS 3 Gradients, WOFF, File API, WebP
Opera 11.00	December 2010	Opera Extensions; Search suggestions; Tab stacking; Visual mouse gestures; Safer Address field; Mail panel; Mail integration of labels and filters; Plug-in on-demand; Core 2.7: CSS 3 Paged Media, CSS 3 Text, more HTML 5 support
Opera 10.60	July 2010	Core 2.6: Geolocation, Offline Web Apps, Web Workers, WebM video format
Opera 10.50	March 2010	Core 2.5: Native JSON, CSS 3 rounded corners, CSS 3 transforms and transitions, HTML 5 Video, Web Storage; Carakan JavaScript engine; Opera Widgets for Desktop; Vega graphics and UI revamp; Improved OS integration; Private browsing
Opera 10.10	November 2009	Opera Unite
Opera 10.00	September 2009	Core 2.2: Webfonts, Acid 3, CSS Colors, CSS Selectors, SVG improvements; inline spell check; Auto-update; Opera Turbo; Visual tabs; HTML mail compose; Crashlogging
Opera 9.6	October 2008	Feed preview; Mail features
Opera 9.5	June 2008	Core 2.1: SVG improvements; Opera Link; Opera Dragonfly; Quick Find (address field search); SSL-EV
Opera 9.2	April 2007	Speed Dial
Opera 9.1	December 2006	Fraud protection
Opera 9.0	June 2006	Core 2.0: Canvas, Web Forms 2.0, XSLT, XPath, Rich text editing, Acid 2; Opera Widgets; Bittorrent; Site Preferences; Content Blocking; Integrated Source Viewer, opera:config

(data picked from the excellent Opera version history document)

I'm no spokesman for Opera Software, but I hope we manage to keep up the release speed from 2010 in this year as well. It would be trendy to call them 12, 13 and 14 instead of (for example) 11.10, 11.50 and 11.60, but I'll leave it to the marketing people to decide on such things

BTW, I'm aware that some people will say 'stop adding features, just fix all the bugs first'. So, there's no need to add comments like that. Especially as it is totally unrealistic.

David Storey, our head web opener, has posted about the upcoming support for 'Selectors' (that is, CSS 3 Selectors) in Peregrine, the codename for the next big update of Opera (current 9.x series is codenamed Merlin). He also mentioned support for the 'text-shadow' property.

'text-shadow' has been dropped from CSS 2.1 because there were not enough implementations, basically it was just Safari (and other webkit-based Mac browsers) for a long time. Later iCab (a non-webkit Mac-browser) also added support, as well as Konqueror. Now, our developers also found a way to implement it.

Here's how text-shadow in Peregrine looks like on my Panelizer pages:



Note that I don't really like the 'pure' text-shadows, but I very much appreciate the blur effect. Using a little blur on :hover is also nice as a link-indicator I think - but there is no mechanism in CSS to fallback to another :hover style if text-shadow is not supported, which might make this use a bit problematic.

Our implementation seems to be quite good:
- support for multiple shadows
- limits to be maximum blur value - you can seriously hurt performance of some other browsers with big blur values

It is a perennial issue: why is Opera's marketshare not growing, when we have a product that attracts a large group of devoted users? I'll leave it to our sales and marketing department to look at this professionally, but one of the things that Firefox had going for it was a aggresive outreach campaign. Sometimes this devolved to rabid fanboyism (still does, actually). I see fanboyism as denying even reasonable complaints about your favorite browser, and issueing sweeping statements about the quality of other browsers not founded in reality, or without any knowledge of the underlying issues and history.

Opera has fanboys of its own. They seem mostly to be confined to the my.opera.com, sometimes venturing out to troll on the mozillazine forums and Asa's blog (though they don't see themselves as trolls, just like Firefox's fanboys). But it is interesting to see some more unabashed Opera promotion from people not linked to my.opera.com, especially when it well-balanced and argumented.

This recent blog post for example is not fanboyism, though it's title is promising: Why Opera beats Firefox. The blog post Opera Is Easily The Best Browser Avalible is politely bashing Firefox but with (IMHO) more shaky arguments.

This much linked blog posting is very positive for the self-image of Opera users, as the comments clearly show: What does your browser reveal about you?.

Then there are several Firefox-to-Opera converts: FireFox slides back. Opera Catches up. and "Opera 9"--- Is the fat lady singing?. Other Firefox fans are trying it out on friend's advice: they like what they see. Another advice to try Opera comes from The Battle of the Web Browsers - IE, Firefox and Opera - Which is Best. This blog post links to a nice review which states for Internet Explorer users, you can import your Favourites, so there really is no reason not to switch, and to a glowing review in Web user, a British magazine.

It helps of course if independent speed tests keep proving that Opera's JavaScript implementation is suberb nowadays. Now if only websites will start making use of Opera 9's improved JavaScript support, and stop sending unzipped content to Opera for example, the web might become an even nicer place for Opera's users. So to all Opera fans: keep telling your friends, especially if they only tried Opera years ago, and keep telling websites they should test in Opera!

Maybe I'm a little bit biased, but there are some glaring errors in this eWeek article, a Q&A with no less a web star as Sir Tim Berners-Lee. They hear what he has to say, but obviously don 't understand, instead they just jot down his words. Here are two nice quotes:

When I wrote the browser, people were using documents with wizzywig editors, so I really assumed that what people were going to use for preparing content was wizzywig, or what you see is what you get.
So that's why I made it an editor and I was really surprised when on platforms which didn't have wizzywig editors, that people were prepared to go to the trouble of learning all the angle brackets and doing the html.

If you look at some of the things that people are doing with AJAX, they're very much data-driven applications. They're things like Google Maps and all the mash-ups built off of that. That will be based on data interactivity capabilities, and that's what the Symantec web is about, allowing people much more power to access data and combine it.

Maybe it's because Symantec is so close to their heart, being a big sponsor of the site and all...

It doesn't help that they don't mention Opera at all in the article on the future of the browser (somehow they manage to publish a couple of related and partially duplicating articles on browsers at the same time).