Tweak

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).