We couldn't help noticing a few of our UNIX users feeling left out after the previous Mac snapshot. Well, it turns you didn't have to wait too long for your own snapshot after all.

In addition to containing fixes from the previous Mac snapshot and Windows RCs the big change is that new packages have arrived for Opera 10.51 UNIX. So if you were waiting for an .rpm or .deb package before you start testing, you no longer have any excuses. Please note however, that this does not mean that every issue is fixed. It simply means that you can test the packages themselves if you are comfortable with that or if the outstanding issues are not ones that bother you, then you could choose to install Opera 10.51 UNIX and make it your primary browser. In either scenario we would recommend you backup your profile ('~/.opera') first to allow you to downgrade should you need to, because once installed Opera will use the default profile (rather than a testing profile). You can of course continue to use the 'opera' script included in the root directory of an extracted tarball package to run Opera in place with a test profile, as has been the case with all Opera 10.5x snapshots so far.

I have also written a complementary article to this one on my own blog. That posting is primarily aimed at our intermediate to advanced UNIX users. If you are new to UNIX you may find it to be too much detail. However, if you are interested in packaging or just want to know a little bit more about workarounds for minor issues please check it out! If you are a user of the install script bundled in the tarball packages, you should certainly read in as the changes are potentially biggest for you.

Highlights

• Completely New Packages

Known Issues

• Packaging: No desktop integration for users of old Desktop Environments on non deb/rpm distros
• Packaging: Extra unneeded GTK libraries get installed on some distros
• Packaging: Removal of 'prefix'/'DESTDIR' install script options
• Font problems
• Language input issues
• No KDE integration (yet)
• Problem with address field drop down position under non compositing Window Managers
• Black drop down menus for some KDE3 users
• Black border around Ctrl+Tab dialog when running under compositing Window Managers
• Some command line options don't work

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.

Download

• Unix/Linux

Read more...

Windows 10.50 is released and we are still the fastest browser available! If you haven't downloaded it yet, what is taking you so long? Head over to www.opera.com/download, to get your hands on it now. We have gone from Pre-Alpha to Final in just over two months (with a Christmas holiday in between I might add). Never has the development of the desktop browser been so fast. Our developers are rivalling Carakan for speed! But the thanks doesn't just go to them, we simply couldn't have done it without your testing and feedback. So give yourselves a big pat on the back for all that we have achieved together. In the last couple of blog posts, several of you commented that our developers deserve some time off and whilst that is true, I know the Mac and UNIX teams are still hungry to get their own versions of 10.50 out. So there will be no slacking off, just yet. Development continues apace! Whilst you Mac and UNIX users await your respective finals, we thought we'd give you another snapshot. Like the Windows final, these builds have the latest rendering improvements but are understandably still rougher around the edges, as they have not yet been fully optimised and integrated into their environments (though Mac is getting close). Highlights

• The latest Presto and Carakan improvements

Known Issues

• Mac
  • No support for PowerPC (PPC)
  • Minimal Java Support
  • Possible performance issues on low end machines
• UNIX
  • Font problems
  • Language input issues
  • Compiz issues
  • No .deb or .rpm packages
  • Some Command line option don't work

WARNING: Opera 10.50 for Mac and Unix 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. Downloads

• Mac Intel
• UNIX

It seems like yesterday we released Opera 9.6 and now you can all get your hands on Opera 10.0. Rather than ramble on, here's a quick list of what's new:

• Presto 2.2 Engine
• Performance boost
• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• Auto-update
• Inline spelling checker
• Opera Mail improvements, including rich text composition and delete after X days
• Widget Improvements on Linux

Can't wait to get your hands on Opera 10.0 Alpha 1, then get it now!

Download
Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
Macintosh (Intel-only)
UNIX


What's New
Below is an overview of the new functionality in Opera 10.0 Alpha 1.

Presto 2.2 Engine

Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 includes Presto 2.2 (Kestrel includes Presto 2.1.1), an updated version of Opera's Core. Presto 2.2 features numerous new features and loads of bug fixes, such as:

• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• New regular expression engine, which greatly improves performance
• Improved CSS performance
• Pretty-printing of unstyled XML
• Web font support
• RGBA and HSLA support
• Selectors API support

Auto-update
The long awaited auto-update functionality is here! That's right, Opera will now update itself as new versions are released. And for those of you who want every single snapshot release just enable the "Download All Snapshots" setting (opera:config#AutoUpdate). Please be aware that if you do so, you will be upgrading to all snapshots - and as you know: snapshots contain the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all. You have been warned


Inline Spelling Checker
Opera now checks your spelling as you write! The inline spelling checker is enabled by default for multi-line edit fields and this Alpha comes with a US English dictionary. Use the context menu of input fields to change the settings, and to correct spelling errors. See the detailed changelog for information about using other dictionaries.

Opera Mail Improvements
Rich Text Composition
Opera Mail can now send rich text messages! You can insert inlined images, styled text, links, custom HTML, and more! You can also forward and redirect rich text messages or reply to them with styled text.
In the account settings select "Prefer HTML formatting" in the outgoing tab so that you can start writing rich text mails by default in our WYSIWYG editor!

Remove from server after X days (POP-only)
This new feature is for our POP users with limited server space. Opera Mail can now remove messages from the server that have been there for X days. Of course you can limit Opera Mail to only remove read messages from the server, and/or only fully downloaded messages, which works great in combination with low-bandwith mode.

Other Changes
When viewing a message, the message subjects are now a text field again instead of a button. We have added also a "Thread" button to the message list toolbar to make some features more visible.

Widget Improvements on Linux/UNIX
We have added experimental support for true transparency for widgets on Linux/UNIX. For this to work you have to have an X Server that provides a 32-bit visual device and a running composite manager. If you start Opera from a terminal it will print this message if it detects a suitable 32-bit visual device: "(experimental) ARGB visual detected: Use '-visual 0x6f' to activate it".

If you have a composite manager running you can then try it out by starting Opera with: "opera -visual 0x6f" (0x6f may be another number on your machine).

Detailed Changelogs

• Windows
• Mac
• Linux/UNIX

Enjoy!

Здравствуйте, дорогие пользователи! Hello, dear users!

Here is another Friday build for you, with a lot of bug fixes and cool stuff added. Before reporting issues, please check the Known issues section at the bottom of this post! We get a lot of duplicate bug reports on the known issues every time we release a snapshot. Please save the QA team some time by not reporting them once again.


Layout width detection for thumbnails
Even in 2007, when it's common to have a 1600×1200 screen (or two of them), and when at the same time people browse the web using mobile devices with 320×240 screens, there are still a lot of web designers who assume that a “typical user” has a 800 or 1024 pixel wide screen. On the other hand, many websites stretch dynamically, making good use of all the available horizontal space.

When you hold the mouse over a tab, a page thumbnail appears. We used to generate these thumbnails by taking the 1024 leftmost pixels from what you see in the window, even if the window is wider. This worked acceptably for many popular newspaper sites, but broke Google's main page and other pages that fill up the entire window or have something centered. The wider your screen is, the easier it was to see that the thumbnail image was cut off on the right. It also broke those fixed-layout websites that had their concent centered rather than left-aligned. However, taking the entire window width instead of the 1024 pixels wasn't an option, too, because it would leave a lot of white space on the right of thumbnails for fixed-layout pages, making miniature pictures look even smaller and uglier.

In this build, we're including an experimental feature that tries to deal with fixed-width layouts without breaking flexible layouts. The new layout width detection code runs some heuristic checks on the page layout and tries to detect whether it has been made for fixed with. The algorithm measures the width occupied by all meaningful content (text, images, plugins, input fields, but not empty space with backgrounds) and compares it to typical screen width values such as 800 and 1024 with some degree of tolerance. It can detect both left-aligned or centered layouts.

When generating a thumbnail, we now first try to detect a fixed layout. If we have one, then only the part of the horizontal space actually occupied by meaningful content is used to make the thumbnail; otherwise, a miniature of the entire window is generated. This means that you should not see any more wasted space on the sides of thumbnails when you hover a tab, but the pages that fill the entire window should never be cut off. Because this is, in fact, guesswork, it's expected to fail and give incorrect results now and then, but not too often. Please experiment with all kinds of pages and all kinds of settings and report any cases when it breaks.

For now, we're only using the layout width detection for thumbnails, but we might as well start using it for something else in the future.


Other new stuff

• New “logical searching” code — this means that inline find is now practically instant even on very long pages
• The Feeds toolbar got a new button to check for updates
• Added “Make Readable” action. Currently, it's not available through any menu, toolbar, or keyboard shortcut, but it's possible to bind it manually. How it works: select some text on the page that is hard to read because the font size is too small, then activate the action. The page will automatically zoom up so that the text becomes readable
• Added support for pointer-events="boundingBox" in SVG
• It is now possible to use an SVG image in an IMG element as well as specify one as a background image in CSS
• Improved performance of JS Date.getX methods

Bugs fixed

• Fixed an issue where pages could cause scripts to run in opera:historysearch. Thanks to David Bloom for reporting the issue
• Fixed display of inline elements within justified text
• Element borders are no longer offset from the area filled with background color
• No more crashing on contenteditable in XML
• Text-shadow with 1px blur radius now actually shows some blurring
• Widgets whose files are in a subdirectory of the zip archive are supported again
• The list of chat rooms now shows the correct number of users in each room
• No more repaint artefacts with the dropdown menu on www.subsys.no
• getAttribute will return the updated value after modifying the element's style properties
• Two attributes with the same local name and namespace on the same XML element are now a fatal parsing error, as per XML spec
• Opera no longer spends a lot of time on startup trying to read every file in the cache
• Pending IMAP and POP commands are now preserved and optionally executed on the next startup
• Getters and setters are now exposed for properties of native JS objects
• Fixed fetching of POP mail after purging the trash
• The outline doesn't follow the “silhouette” of children elements clipped using overflow:hidden anymore
• Legend is not anymore pushed into the fieldset by a comment before it
• Entities sent to plugins are now properly decoded, fixes slideshow on www.vg.no
• setTimeout() is no longer confused when an object is passed instead of a numeric delay value
• Mail passwords are no longer lost when clearing wand passwords
• No more crashing when installing widgets
• The client certificate selection dialog now shows the originating server name
• Messages wouldn't have attachment icons and wouldn't show in the Attachment views; fixed now
• Styling of opera:historysearch is now consistent with other internal Opera pages such as opera:about
• Bodies of auto-saved drafts wouldn't display; fixed now
• Downloads won't overwrite existing files without warning anymore
• Fixed an issue with propagation of bottom margins that affected maps.google.com
• Multiple optimizations in the internal search engine used for searching in visited pages and mail
• Dozens of other fixes in the rendering engine
• Fixed some more crashers and memory leaks…

Windows-specific

• Fixed crasher when dragging a toolbar button from a webpage to the Start bar
• Speed Dial sometimes showed thumbnails for wrong pages
• Ellipses in menus were displaed incorrectly on Windows 98
• Fixed a DDE communication issue
• Interlaced PNG images with alpha transparency are now displayed correctly in Windows Vista
• Nonsensical filter is no more shown in the file chooser for a form upload
• Opera window is no more resizable in full screen mode
• Left Alt+Shift doesn't switch the text direction anymore

UNIX-specific

• Icons in the File menu are now properly sized in QT4 builds
• Ensured that all Flash 9.0 r6* versions get the GTK main loop they need
• When avoiding to overwrite an existing file, downloads are now renamed to a more scripting-friendly “filename_N.ext” instead of “filename (N).ext”
• The GTK file chooser is used under XFCE

Mac-specific

• Command-Option-Left/Right added as shortcuts to switch tabs
• Fixed repaint issues on OS X 10.3
• KeyCodes for the arrow keys are now compatible with those on Windows
• The last character or word in an element with text-shadow and opacity is no more lost
• The click that activates an inactive Opera window is now also handled (e.g. it activates buttons)
• U+21A9 LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK character is now rendered properly
• It's now possible to play the Dolphin Olympics game again :-)
• Removed the Brushed Metal skin

Previously known issues fixed in this build

• [BUG 285741] Opera doesn't freeze anymore when opening the feeds menu
• [BUG 271585] The last directory used is now remembered in the Save As and Open dialogs

Known issues

• [BUG 264975] Fixed display of smileys in mail and chat (almost fixed)
• [BUG 290358] Bookmarks cannot be selected from the Bookmarks menu
• [BUG 290355] Opera crashes when clicking bookmarks in Personal bar
• If you used the Brushed Metal skin in the previous release, Opera for OS X will crash on startup
• This build fails the Acid2 test
• [BUG 284849] Yahoo! Mail beta, Flickr maps, Google reader may crash Opera
• Won't run correctly on Windows 95 or 98
• OS X version may cause persistent freezes on start-up
• POP server cleaning has been disabled: When disabling the "Leave messages on server" option, existing messages on the server are not removed
• [BUG 287170] On OS X, UI thumbnails have black backgrounds when using native skins
• [BUG 184894] Native OS X UI elements cannot be used in skins
• [BUG 280536] Opera on OS X will sometimes freeze when exiting Preferences
• [BUG 286384] Yahoo mail is broken
• [BUG 280261] Removing messages from filters does not work
• [BUG 213115] Queued mail is sent at the next check, instead of waiting for manual action

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX