Tweak

So, what do you do if the major point of your marketing campaign is 'we are more secure', and you have to release monthly security updates just like MSIE anyway? And you have some minor open issues anyway? You spin it. I'm glad Opera 8's PR is not focusing solely on the security!

In your next post, you bash your competetitor by saying "it's almost as good as our product now", ignoring that many people obviously think the bigger feature set makes that other product already much more usable, despite a few trivial quibbles you have with it (Offering some information during the installation? A text selection cursor? Is that the best you can come up with?).

To make it complete, you then describe a new experimental feature not available in your normal builds, which might one day come to normal releases, as the best thing since sliced bread, and completely fail to mention that the competitor previously dismissed on trivial grounds has pioneered the very same thing a few years ago, introducing the name and concept, and honed it to perfection by now.

Ah well, spinning is part of his job I suppose. But this sequence of postings is something special...

NOTE: I've made a webpage now to present the user.js framework script. See <http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/userjs.html>

Hallvord introduced Opera's latest surprise for tweakers in his Journal.

What is a user script

Basically it is a script from a local file that gets executed before any other scripts (or event handlers) on the page, once in every document.

I've collected some more or less interesting scripts that I'd like to run on all pages, and on specific sites, in this user script: <http://people.opera.com/rijk/opera/scripts/user.js>. I'm not yet using any versioning there BTW, it can be a different script tomorrow, or in an hour. The script is set up to easily add extra functions, and enable/disable them for all or for specific sites when you want. Don't expect me to explain specific functions, because I'm not a proficient JavaScripter myself. I'd say: experiment, share, and file bug reports if necessary.

Enabling user script in Opera 8 beta 3

[User Prefs]
User Javascript=1
User Javascript File=C:Program FilesOperauserjs.js

Security

The script has exactly the same restrictions as a script on the page, except that it can access some User JS specific functionality (we'll get back to you on that) and that it can read the text property on any script element (normal scripts can't read the text property of external scripts loaded from other servers than the document.)

The additional privileges are available when the User JS file is initially executed and when a User JS event is being handled. Global functions defined by User JS but called from a script in the page have no special privileges.

Compare


and



Note: this is an interesting comparison today, 2004-12-10, these dynamically generated images might not look that special after Firefox patches some issues. Snapshot.

The security update 7.54u this evening fixes two Secunia advisories, only one is taken into account at the moment, so actually the red widge should represent only 3.5% of the circle.


Update 2005-03-08: On this joyful day 'Opera 7' is given a green circle by Secunia. Never mind that they are actually looking at Opera 8 beta 2, reinforcing the title of this post...