Opera Add-ons

Extensions and themes for the Opera desktop browser

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RTL

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Tuesday, July 10, 2012 9:35:27 AM

There are a few languages where the writing starts from the right of the page, and continues to the left. We call them right to left scripts, or RTL for short. One of the more notable RTL languages is Arabic which we are now happy to support on our addons website.

If your browser is already set to Arabic language you can just head over to http://addons.opera.com to see the changes, otherwise you can check it out here.

Øyvind Håkestad, our user interface guru, says of the RTL support:

While in the process of making addons.opera.com work for Arabic, the easy way out would have been to let only the text flow from right to left. But we wanted to do it properly, by making the whole page rtl.

This involved converting all of our Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) from ltr (left to right) to rtl. Since we have a fair amount of CSS code (that keep changing all the time), we figured doing this manually would be too much work. It would also be error prone. We already had an automated process for making CSS from Less code, and we thought plugging in something that converted our CSS from ltr to rtl would be cool.

There are already code out there doing this type of conversion, but for various reasons, we chose to implement our own. It is written as a library for Node, and it can be installed through npm. We've made the code available on Github, and we hope it may be useful for other people as well :-)

You can find it here: https://github.com/operasoftware/flipcss



4 comments

Cheeky themes

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Wednesday, June 27, 2012 9:47:22 AM

So far we have taken a reasonably liberal approach to the content of the themes that we allow into our themes catalog. We have a list of acceptance criteria we use and everyone that upload content must adhere to our Terms of Service, which explicitly states:

You warrant that you will not upload Content that is obscene, vulgar, sexually oriented, hateful, threatening, or that violates any laws or third-party rights, including but not limited to third-party intellectual property rights.



A few people have commented that we are allowing themes into our catalog that are of a slightly explicit nature. Our acceptance criteria so far have been "no nudity or sexually explicit content", which our moderators are currently interpreting as "no private bits". That's fairly straight forward and easy to moderate.

But we want our catalog to be safe for everybody to browse, including children, so we have decided to take a stricter approach to explicit content. We are now introducing a new acceptance criteria which is stricter, but more ambiguous: "No sexual undertones, nudity or explicit content". It will be up to our moderators to use their best judgment and I hope you appreciate why we are doing this if you are uploading a theme that you think is borderline. In fact, a general rule of thumb is, if it's borderline sexual, then it's not OK.

As a consequence of the new acceptance criteria we will remove a few themes from the catalog. I humbly ask the people that shared their "cheeky" themes to be understanding of why we are doing this.

17 comments

Installation changes - new security defaults, without lock-in

By Charles McCathieNevilechaals. Friday, June 22, 2012 11:47:00 AM

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We are always worried about users' security at Opera, and of course this applies to extensions as well. There are no cast-iron guarantees, but we do a code review on extensions submitted to us, we think carefully about the security implications of capabilities we allow for extensions, and we're on the lookout for what users and developers do and how to make it work better for them.

One part of this is making the normal installation go through addons.opera.com by default. Here is what we are planning...

Read more...

20 comments

Attention developers: Screenshot APIs and an updated URL Filter API are ready for testing

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Wednesday, May 16, 2012 1:52:03 PM

A labs release of Opera is now out with support for the following extension APIs:

  • Screenshot
  • Resource loader (normally used in conjunction with the screenshot APIs)
  • URL filter updates (normally used for Ad Blocking extensions)

Read more and try out the new builds over at labs.opera.com

Please note that these APIs will not be part of Opera 12, but a later release.

7 comments

Extension API for Windows and Tabs (and tab groups)

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Friday, May 4, 2012 9:46:21 AM

In Opera 12 beta we introduced a brand new windows and tabs API for extensions. It allows developers to create extensions that can access and control tabs and windows, e.g. to create tab groups of your Google search results, or extensions for managing your open tabs.

We already had a simple Windows and Tab API but this is a considerable update with many fixes and new features. It's currently still being polished and made ready for Opera 12 but certainly ready for trial.

Extension developers that have been using the old Windows and Tabs API are recommended to update their extensions to take advantage of the new APIs.

For more information please see our Windows and Tabs documentation over at dev.opera.com.

5 comments

Jazz up Opera

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Thursday, April 26, 2012 6:00:18 AM

Having a bad day? Hungover? Rained on? Opera themes wont help with any of that, but they can certainly jazz up Opera and maybe make your day a little brighter.

With Opera 12 alpha we started supporting themes, a much more lightweight version of our existing skinning system. Today we're adding these to addons.opera.com and opening up for everybody to upload and share their themes.

Our existing skin section on My Opera will be discontinued and replaced with addons.opera.com/themes. Designers that have published skins on My Opera should re-upload these to addons.opera.com. In the new Add-ons catalog we will not make any differentiation between skins and themes. This will remain a technical detail for designers to consider, whether they want to use skins or the new and lightweight themes to enhance the look of Opera. The old skin system is of course very powerful, but at the same time complex and hard to ensure compatibility across versions of Opera and different operating systems. We will generally recommend designers to use the lightweight version.

Note to skin developers: please re-upload your skins to addons.opera.com/themes

Get Opera Next to try out themes. There is an article on how to make your own theme of dev.opera.com

109 comments

Increased focus on Opera extensions and ending support for Unite applications and Widgets

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Tuesday, April 24, 2012 3:01:03 PM

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Today we are announcing the beginning of the end for two of our current Add-on platforms. Starting with the upcoming Opera 12 release, Opera Unite and Opera Widgets will be turned off by default for new users. The two Add-on platforms will be completely removed in a later release expected before the end of this year.

Over the last six years we have learned a lot from our work on Opera Widgets and Opera Unite, and when we later built the extension platform for Opera 11 we benefited significantly from this experience. Our extension technology has been a great success, with millions of monthly downloads, and so far completely dwarfing the other platforms. Recently, Opera also shipped a labs version with extension support in Opera Mobile, investigating a fully cross-platform extension environment.

Moving forward we want to focus on one high quality Add-on platform across our products, rather than spending resources on maintaining legacy systems. The know how and and technologies from Unite and Widgets are already being reused in other Opera products. An example is the recently announced UPnP support in Opera Dragonfly.

To provide your feedback about use cases for Opera Unite or Opera Widgets you want to transfer other Opera products, please visit to our forum.

If you are a Widget developer you might be interested in how to convert Widgets to extensions.

400 comments

Catalog update!

By Torgeir Lorange Østbytorgeilo. Wednesday, April 18, 2012 2:57:59 PM

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You might have noticed a slight change on addons.opera.com p

Half a year of changes were released yesterday! Here are a few highlights apart from the completely obvious, and a bit more technical than what you can find elsewhere:

  • URLs no longer contain extension version numbers. This should eliminate a lot of dead links pointing to older versions of extensions.
  • Extensions are no longer filtered based on which browser you use. Everything is listed anyway, but you might see a message telling you that you need a certain version of Opera for an extension to work properly (for example Opera Next for upcoming features). This should also eliminate more dead links.
  • The ratings are now weighted against an average (Bayesian rating), providing a more sane ranking of the top rated extensions.
  • A few languages now receive special treatment in the search engine, for improved matching. The languages are Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Polish, and German. In order to benefit from this, you need to change the filter language (the drop-down with the globe button) to one of the mentioned ones. (We are still working on improving things, here.)
For extension developers:

  • You can now attach any license to your extensions!
  • You can edit the name of your extensions as long as they are not public yet.
More good stuff and smaller improvements are to come soonish wink

Enjoy!

10 comments

Extensions on Opera Mobile

By Arnstein Teigenespirobind. Tuesday, April 3, 2012 1:27:37 PM

We're pretty excited to announce a labs release of Opera Mobile with support for extensions. You can read more about it on labs.opera.com.

It's of course quite rough around the edges, being a labs release, so if you're feeling adventurous then take it for a spin and let us know what you think.

11 comments

Catalog update!

By Torgeir Lorange Østbytorgeilo. Tuesday, September 20, 2011 1:52:19 PM

It has been some time, but a new version is finally out! The highlights:

  • Optimizations! You might have noticed already that the site is much more responsive
  • Translations! You can find a drop-down for changing the page language at the bottom of the pages (more languages are in the works)
  • The links to the developer sections and for logging out, just below the main header, should be more obvious now
  • Developers can now delete their extensions from the catalog
  • A lot of smaller fixes
Regarding the "Show items in" drop-down, a fix for the duplicate languages should be a few weeks away from release. This will also include improved localized sorting of various lists throughout the site.

Enjoy!

16 comments

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