Opera Desktop Team

CSS gradients, WebP, and Declarative UI

By Ruarí Ødegaardruario. Tuesday, March 15, 2011 9:54:17 AM

, , ,

We decided to throw you a "fastball" and give you another snapshot with some really cool new Core features, including native WebP support (win!) and linear CSS gradients support (epic win!).

We also thought we would give you a little more information with regards to an obscure looking 'fix' included a couple of blog posts back mentioning Declarative UI. Declarative UI represents the future of dialogs and other native UI in Opera. Those of you who regularly sniff around in the contents of the Opera packages might know that our dialogs have been generated via a file called dialog.ini, which contains positions, sizes and other properties for many of the UI controls appearing in Opera. This is part of Opera's UI toolkit, Quick, and allows us to make dialogs appear similar across different platforms.

However, the format also has its limitations. Because it relies on absolute pixel values for the layout of the controls, it's easy to make mistakes when changing it. In addition, it's hard to adapt to different string sizes for different languages, changes in layout for a specific platform to get closer to platform guidelines, and dialogs with variable contents.

Because of these and other reasons that you'll hear more about in the future we’re moving towards a new format, written in YAML. The first dialog that you'll see that uses this format is the label properties dialog in Opera Mail (activated by right-clicking a label and selecting properties). If you use Opera Mail, please take a look at this dialog and report any problems you might have. And if you feel like taking a look under the hood, check out the dialogs.yaml file in your Opera package.

Known issues
  • If you have lots of labels, the dialog will appear with a vertical scrollbar to scroll the content
  • Link not working on the Mac (Link is disabled for Speed Dial on the other platforms)

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

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Changelog
Core
  • CORE-1 (Missing support for SOCKS proxy): Still needs a UI but can be configured by opera:config#Proxy for now
  • CORE-25395 (Partial CSS gradients support): Using the Opera -o- vendor prefix, Opera Presto supports: -o-linear-gradient() and -o-repeating-linear-gradient(), <gradient> is only supported in background and background-image, <gradient> is not supported in list-style-image and border-image
  • CORE-32400 (Added native WebP support)
  • CORE-36305 (Updates to Strings and translations)
  • CORE-33382 (UserJS code not run in extensions if page does not include a script tag)
  • CORE-34929 (Links in extension pages that try to open extension-internal urls in new windows don't work)
  • CORE-35064 (The extension background process should be able to be reloaded correctly and without crashing)
  • CORE-35180 (Crash on bottom aligned inline-block with unclosed, child paragraph)
  • CORE-35209 (Extension pages should be allowed to navigate to other extension-internal pages via the location object)
  • CORE-35248 (Extension-related windows with scriptless documents aren't closed when the extension is disabled)
  • CORE-35350 (Widget Interface should be exposed on the user JS side of extensions)
  • CORE-35492 (urlload/urlfinished events received in wrong order)
  • CORE-35746 (Console object in Web Workers doesn't log anything to the error console)
  • CORE-35898 (Tab urls exposed from extensions don't include the url's fragment identifier)
  • CORE-36114 (Caret placement at line ends broken in contentEditable <pre> tags (wrapped lines case - causes problems in M2))
  • CORE-36131 (Zooming in/out print preview for mail crashes Opera)
  • CORE-36237 (The background process shouldn't be allowed to navigate away from the extension's index.html)
  • Crash fixes

Desktop
  • DSK-330050 (Crash on startup when dialogs appear before the main window): Further fix
  • DSK-330700 (Don't use the logo finder if a Speed Dial has a reload frequency set)
  • DSK-330722 (Reload the page to view plug-in content toolbar shown despite Flash being previously installed)
  • DSK-330746 (Default searches are not preserved after upgrade)
  • DSK-330771 (View-mode="minimized" for Speed Dial doesn't trigger 260x195 viewport)
  • DSK-330802 (Find a better default level for ThumbnailLogoPadding)
  • DSK-330852 (Speed Dial animations cause leak)
  • DSK-330876 (Crash when sorting a mail view and then switching between mail views)

Important crash fixesSychronized Speed Dial 2.0

Comments

NicoHellbillyDeluxe Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:13:06 AM

Thanks for the new Snapshot! smile

Small typo: "Because of these and other reasons that you'll here more about in the future" -> must be "hear"

cousin333 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:13:16 AM

First? Almost...

Nice new features. WebP support in beta was expected after the Opera press release of SxSW.

lunatic001 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:18:57 AM

Wow! Thanks

Ruarí Ødegaardruario Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:19:20 AM

Originally posted by HellbillyDeluxe:

Small typo: "Because of these and other reasons that you'll here more about in the future" -> must be "hear"

Yup, that was actually pointed out to me by a colleague before I made this snapshot live. Hmm ... I guess I forgot to update it. doh

ouzowtfouzoWTF Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:20:59 AM

CORE-1 bigsmile

Robert MeijersRobert90 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:22:16 AM

Known issues with the label dialog


Does this mean the Known issues from the previous snapshot(s) are carried over? (most likely, because they aren't listed as fixed)

Ruarí Ødegaardruario Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:23:50 AM

Originally posted by Robert90:

Does this mean the Known issues from the previous snapshot(s) are carried over? (most likely, because they aren't listed as fixed)

No, not all of them but we are not maintaining a public list of all outstanding known issues.

Malgalad Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:25:52 AM

Hmm, after installing this build added Opera's predefined bookmarks to my speeddial.
Win7 x64.

adamthirnis Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:27:41 AM

Multiple speed dial columns not fitting within the screen area is not helpful and I hope this is not going to be a permanent feature.

Mod0528 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:28:16 AM

vague comment removed

Mascotmascot Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:39:17 AM

Huge thanks for SOCKS proxy support! yes

Ruarí Ødegaardruario Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:40:46 AM

Originally posted by adamthirnis:

Multiple speed dial columns not fitting within the screen area is not helpful and I hope this is not going to be a permanent feature.

use zoom

Siddhartha Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:45:52 AM

Lol, every year on my birthday there is a new snapshot smile 10x Opera nice present smile

ouzowtfouzoWTF Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:46:26 AM

This build crashes when I try to visit the blog post of this build (http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2011/03/15/css-gradients-webp-declarativeui). I just wanted to ask if its intended, that the speed dial entries of a clean install are automatically added to my custom speed dial?!

(posted from Firefox now :/)

w7x64sp1

QuHno Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:48:06 AM

Nice work - no problems so far yes

What? CORE1 is gone? yikes
(going to set up a socks proxy)

BTW: What bug# has ICC support? I need another pet bug wink




kanstisama Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:49:02 AM

Speeddial thumbnails looks much better know. Thx for this improvement smile

michaelmilliVanilli Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:49:41 AM

with this snapshot i can't open any pages. upgraded from 2040. win7 x64.
reverted back to 2040 and everything is fine.

pursanovd Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:50:40 AM

Thank you for fixing bug with Mater Password crash on startup! At last smile just before the BETA smile
Good work Desktop Team!

Daniel HendrycksDanielHendrycks Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:50:49 AM

This is the beta, right?
Loving the features and hoping for greater stability. smile

UtkarshUtkarsh1 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:52:12 AM

@Ruarí:
I cannot connect to the Internet in this build. I connect via my University's proxy server with Authentication enabled. Whenever I try to browser Internet, Opera doesn't ask for authentication and just keeps displaying "Connecting to Server" and does nothing.

Please FIX this problem. I've tried clearing cache but the above mentioned problem remains in this build. sad

I've reverted back to the older Snapshot build now which works perfectly. sad

Long time Opera user here.

aiky Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:52:39 AM

open any page, click the "view" button and use the scroll wheel on the zoom bar: does not zoom and 100% CPU load

Daniel HendrycksDanielHendrycks Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:58:13 AM

Originally posted by ouzowtf:

I just wanted to ask if its intended, that the speed dial entries of a clean install are automatically added to my custom speed dial?!


Reconfirmed. Win7 x64

Originally posted by desktopteam:

(Speed Dial animations cause leak)


up

fresco Tuesday, March 15, 2011 10:58:27 AM

Thanks for the snapshot. Does the change of the interface files mean we will get a more native GUI, like native menus in the windows version?

The label properties dialog could use a minimum height. It has a minimum width that is pretty high though.

frogstomp Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:00:10 AM

when you say gradient support, what do you mean by that? i checked this site and hoped that opera logo would now be displayed with gradient applied as it does with chrome and ff, but this is not the case. please explain.

http://desandro.com/articles/opera-logo-css/

Bill PBill_P Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:03:04 AM

Personal bar - why did all these search sites that I had deleted from the search engine list just appear on my personal bar? The ones Opera insterys every so often.

update: Woa! they're in by bookmarks, that's why they're in the bar

A.shunshunyi Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:04:00 AM

This is exciting version, like

Ruarí Ødegaardruario Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:04:19 AM

Originally posted by frogstomp:

when you say gradient support, what do you mean by that? i checked this site and hoped that opera logo would now be displayed with gradient applied as it does with chrome and ff, but this is not the case. please explain.

http://desandro.com/articles/opera-logo-css/

That page is using vendor prefixes -moz- and -webkit-. Ours is -o- (see also the changelog entry above).

If you change the -moz- prefixes in opera-logo-css.css to -o- it should work.

kersurk Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:06:43 AM

These are some really nice features.

XenoAntaresXAntares Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:07:34 AM

Hooray for CORE-1!bigsmile

porneL Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:10:53 AM

It's fantastic that you're doing something to get (hopefully) more native look'n'feel on OS X!

However, by the glitchy rendering and odd keyboard navigation behavior I presume you're still faking your own Cocoa controls instead of just using the real ones… Is it really too hard to convert your declarative UI to a "nib"?

Look of labels window is totally wrong — it mimicks Aqua buttons and dropdowns (which have wrong line height, BTW), but OS X has its own "textured"-style UI for building filtering rules (NSPredicateEditor), like Finder, Mail and everything with Smart Folders has.


Bill PBill_P Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:12:01 AM

New label dialogs - don't like the tabs, prefer rule and options on same page/tab

MaximSailorMax Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:13:44 AM

Looks like my extension now eat all memory when trying to translate any selection of page... (memory leak) smile
https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/translator/

confirm?

ChrisSlamdex Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:23:54 AM

Originally posted by porneL:

I presume you're still faking your own Cocoa controls instead of just using the real ones… Is it really too hard to convert your declarative UI to a "nib"?

Opera is a cross platform browser, yes?

ClashCityRockerclashcityrocker Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:29:26 AM

Also the first build of Baracudda that's labelled "11.10 beta"

Not 11.10 Alpha....

party

Ruarí Ødegaardruario Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:31:39 AM

Originally posted by clashcityrocker:

Also the first build of Baracudda that's labelled "11.10 beta"

I wouldn't draw too much into that. This is still just a snapshot.

Kamaleshkamalesh Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:32:37 AM

Apple page top-menu seems corrupted; only showing one home page button...
(OSX v10.6.6)

dracodraconair Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:34:36 AM

Well, counters in "All messages" will be ever skinned? I know, it is a small bug... but how many time must elapse to fix it? sad

And still, fade in - fade out "Please keep comments" still use 100% one CPU core.

cascarudex Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:39:56 AM

Originally posted by ruario:

Originally posted by Opera desktop Team

ncluding native WebP support (win!) and linear CSS gradients support (epic win!)

yikes cheers Thx!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

mrd Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:44:46 AM

I just installed this snapshot. It opened up with my existing 3 or 4 tabs and speed dial added the Opera pages to it. I removed a few of them (opening one to see what it was before closing that tab)

I then disabled Opera Link, and re-enabled it to check 1. which account it was syncing to and 2. to see if the speed dial was being synced now.

I then opened a new tab and it crashed. Submitted one of the auto generated crashreports for it.

Also when I re-opened Opera after that, and attempted to come to *this* page, the page did not load; showing a blank page no matter how often I attempted a reload. Until I closed the tab and came back into the page using my speed dial for the DTT and clicking the link into this blog. Peculiar

mrd Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:47:05 AM

Whenever changes were made to the speed dial thumbnail generation to no longer display just the icon of a site: I like. It was daft like that, providing no value. I see the two where I was experiencing that mostly (engadget and arstechnica) now show a little bit more meaningful snippet of the page.

(though I still think we lose something with not having the full snapshot which shows you more of the page, at least showing roughly the first article but meh)

Martin RauscherHades32 Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:47:18 AM

beer beer beer

porneL Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:55:03 AM

Originally posted by Slamdex:

Opera is a cross platform browser, yes?


IMHO it should be using the best UI possible on each platform, instead of portable UI that doesn't quite fit any of them (or doesn't fit any except reference one).

Portability ruins UIs. What is considered good UI design from Windows perspective looks lame on OS X and vice-versa.

And on top of that I just don't see why Opera's UI toolkit can't use Cocoa controls for the simple things like buttons, text boxes and dropdowns. Opera's fake-Aqua buttons aren't ported to other platforms, so why not replace bad-non-portable with good-non-portable?

Howking HeyingHowking Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:57:21 AM

YouTube still not working.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t023zGWGdbA
embed YouTube work

zoquete Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:57:39 AM

please change this huge + in speed dial.
Make it the same way as "cofigure".

I have big problems with native skins: black addressbar background, redraw issues .... Could you test it? Did you make changes to skins?

kapsi Tuesday, March 15, 2011 11:59:41 AM

I guess the final 11.10 is coming fast, with 4 snapshots this week?

Alexey KulakovAwkward Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:02:18 PM

very often memory leaks in this build (2-3 pages opened and opera eat more and more memory). OS - Windows XP, extensions: Content Block helper, Download Helper, ID-jumper, NoAds fixed, Youtube downloader.

Alexey KulakovAwkward Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:03:53 PM

Originally posted by zoquete:

I have big problems with native skins: black addressbar background, redraw issues .... Could you test it? Did you make changes to skins?


The same. Windows native skin problem.

Rijk Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:09:59 PM

Originally posted by Howking:

YouTube still not working.

Works fine here. Please add some details about your system, and see if installed extensions interfere etc.

Rijk Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:13:33 PM

Originally posted by porneL:

IMHO it should be using the best UI possible on each platform, instead of portable UI that doesn't quite fit any of them (or doesn't fit any except reference one).

Not feasible, that simply would mean no more Opera for Mac. I'm not a programmer so I will not comment on how 'easy' it is to use the native widgets.

More useful would be specific comments about UI elements that could be done better, like the initial comment here about dropdown selectors for building filtering rules.

ChrisSlamdex Tuesday, March 15, 2011 12:14:47 PM

Originally posted by porneL:

IMHO it should be using the best UI possible on each platform, instead of portable UI that doesn't quite fit any of them (or doesn't fit any except reference one).

That's a tradeoff, now isn't it? Spend too much time on native UIs for tiny platforms, and you start losing money. You can't spend all your time rewriting the UI from scratch for every single platform.

Originally posted by kapsi:

I guess the final 11.10 is coming fast, with 4 snapshots this week?

Beta, actually.

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