Opera News

Opera 10.53 beta is now available for Linux users! Opera Talks grabbed Arjan van Leeuwen for a brief talk about Opera Linux development. Find out why the Linux version was delayed, what new features we can expect and get some insights into Opera Development!

If you are a Linux user you probably want to drop by and download the beta!

Arjan van Leeuwen Developer, Opera Desktop

Choose Opera: Hi there Arjan, could you please tell us a bit about yourself and what you do at Opera?

Arjan: Hi there! I work as a developer in Opera's desktop team, and have been doing that since 2006. I'm originally from the Netherlands, but after finishing my studies I moved to Oslo to join Opera. At the end of 2008 I moved to our office in Linköping, Sweden. I am currently leading the effort to bring Opera 10.5x to Linux and other Unix-like systems.

Choose Opera: You have been in Opera for a few years now, care to share some of your best experiences?

Arjan: Every release that I have been a part of in the desktop team has been a fantastic experience! Everyone is so focused before a release, and when all the work you've been doing together for some time suddenly becomes available to a lot of users, that's always a great moment. Of course we always go straight back to work after that.

At the end of last year Opera organized a seminar for all its engineers, which was certainly one of the highlights of the year. Apart from the learning experience it was great to talk to engineers from all of our offices face-to-face.

Choose Opera: Many of our users are looking forward to UNIX versions of their favorite browser, what's the status?

Arjan: On UNIX we're almost ready to release our first beta version, which means we've reached a stage where we are feature-complete. A beta version is a big step for us, because it means that a lot more users will get a chance to try the new browser, and hopefully submit bugs if they find them. Some of the big features that we wanted to have before releasing a beta version have now been put in place, such as printing and support for the KDE desktop.

Choose Opera: So, what's the reason for the delay compared to Opera for Windows?

Arjan: There have been some major changes in how Opera works on Unix. A lot of our code used to be implemented using Trolltech's fantastic Qt toolkit, which is also the underlying toolkit of KDE, one of the most popular desktop environments on Linux. However, this limited our appeal to many users who are primarily using a GTK-based environment, such as Xfce or Gnome.

To integrate better with the most popular environments, we have decided to drop our direct dependency on Qt, and instead implement most of our code in a toolkit-agnostic way. Since much of our painting code had to be redone already (because of the new Vega graphics engine, this was the perfect opportunity to do that. This gave us the freedom of integrating with the KDE and GTK libraries where possible. The end result is an Opera version that fits in better on both KDE and GTK-based environments.

Of course, because of the fragmentation in the Unix/Linux world, things quickly become a lot more complicated than on Windows or Mac; apart from writing parts of our code in three varieties (GTK, KDE and pure X11), there are hundreds of different distributions available, and literally millions of configurations out there. Linux users expect to be able to customize every last part of their OS. Making sure that Opera works on all these configurations is one of the things that takes up a lot of time for both QA and developers.

Choose Opera: Thanks for clearing that up, let's finish with our favorite question; what's your favorite Opera feature?

Arjan: In Opera Mail, all of the message threading features save me a lot of time every day. I can subscribe to theads that interest me with 'Follow thread', and, most importantly when you get lots of mail, it is possible to ignore threads.