As you might know, Opera is continously hiring new employees.
We're glad to announce that several new people joined the Desktop Team lately.
Wrocław
Recently the desktop team invaded Sweden. Now the desktop browser will be developed from Poland too. The Polish Opera office is situated in the friendly city Wrocław. The Polish office has opened in 2006 and since then many talented programmers have joined.

Graphics++ from the UK
But not only talented programmers are joining Opera. Opera Desktop and Opera Mini will soon get a visual boost with the help of Jon Hicks. Jon Hicks is well known for his fabulous designs and involvement in the browser community.

Welcome to Opera: Remik, Patryk Obara and Jon Hicks!

Read more...

Coming back from a two week vacation just to find the office half empty because the others have gone on vacation is a bit boring, but at the same time it is very relaxing, giving me a slow start.... The boring part is that so little happens at work when people are on vacation. While I was expecting to make a small changelog this time, I didn't expect it to be this small. Anyway, give the build a spin, we're closing in on 9.52 final now.

WARNING: These are development snapshots: they contain the latest changes, but they also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all.

Changelog

• Readded the Windows shell menu to the Transfer context menu
  
• Fixed an issue with lists not displaying correctly when text rendering is RTL
  
• Fixed opening of files in external applications when disk cache is off
  
• Fixed issue with low quality on YouTube video previews
  
• Fixed mail appearance when Opera is installed in a folder with a "#" character in its name
  
• Fixed RealPlayer on BBC
  
• Added work-arounds for problems with various POP servers
  
• Fixed problem updating signature when switching accounts
  
• Quite a few stability fixes
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Hey
We have fixed the worst issues after 9.50 and are preparing for a 9.51 update.
Please look out for regressions :-)

Changelog

• Added option to toggle mouse flips, and decoupled them from the mouse gesture setting again
  
• Fixed drag/drop of tabs - always drop the address
  
• Fixed menus on deviantart.com
  
• Fixed TinyMCE 2.1.x editor
  
• Feeds now show the first time you subscribe
  
• Fixed crash when printing chat
  
• 64-bit linux is back
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Today's snapshot is significantly faster on Windows thanks to a technique called profile-guided optimization (PGO). Compiler optimizers sometimes make tweaks that are controversial: they improve performance in what it perceives as the most common case, but make it worse in the perceived least common case. The result can be much better if the compiler is given some hints. That's what PGO is about. With this technique, Opera is compiled twice. The first compilation creates a specially instrumented build that gathers statistics about which code is called and which variables are used most often. The instrumented build loads sites automatically using "URL player", a testing feature available in every Opera build (more information about that in a later blog post). This information is dumped into files and used to produce the final build that's optimized based on the gathered statistics.

Opera uses Microsoft's Visual Studio C++ compiler on Windows and gcc on UNIX and OS X, both of which support PGO. On Windows, setting up PGO builds was straight-forward. PGO in gcc is a different story. On both UNIX and OS X, the first PGO builds crashed. Work continues to resolve this issue.

WARNING: These are development snapshots: they contain the latest changes, but they also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all.

Known Issues

• [Bug 327180] Dragonfly does not work when JavaScript is disabled.
  
• [Bug 324985] International installer on Windows is broken when using some languages.
  
• [Bug 324377] Save Linked Content As fails sporadically.
  
• [Bug 327333] Some SVGs do not paint on Windows.
  
• [Bug 328186] Crash when using Master Password.
  
• [Bug 324727] The Octoshape plug-in causes Opera to crash on start-up.
  
• The tab bar on Mac may mix up favicon/text placement.
  

Changelog

• Fix for reloading inline elements.
  
• Fixed cookie settings for local server names.
  
• Fixed forwarding, replying and redirecting of HTML-only mails.
  
• Fixed high CPU usage when subscribed only to the IMAP Inbox folder on GMail.
  
• F8 now works again to focus address field when focus is in panels.
  
• [Bug 328318] Wand button is fixed again.
  
• Fixed extensions in File > Save As and File > Open dialogs.
  

UNIX specific:

• Fixed updating of Google Maps when panning
  
• CJK fonts should now look better in the default setup
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

We've introduced subtle, but important UI and back-end changes is this build. In just a few words: Kestrel gets EV, the address field will change the way it displays page information, and we now have automatic certificate updates!

This latest snapshot build has support for Extended Validation (EV) certificates. This means that on EV sites you'll see a padlock on a green background. And remember: It ain't EV 'til it's EV, all EV. Opera is a more strict than other browsers, and will display an EV site with a "green padlock" only if all elements on the page are from EV sites. Read Yngve's article for more details.

There are some more changes in the address bar: the fraud protection button will now work differently. For HTTP sites you will not see the button anymore. On HTTPS sites the padlock will be on a yellow background (green for EV). If, however, you come across an HTTPS site which lowers the overall rating of the security level of the page (details on the levels are again to be found in Yngve's article), you will see a grey "?" button, which will provide you with more information on the security level. A fraudulent page will still be flagged with a red warning in the address field.

The back-end change in this snapshot affects the certificate database: we can now add new Roots to the Certificate Authority database without requiring users to update their installation. Find details about this over in Yngve's article.

WARNING: These are development snapshots: they contain the latest changes, but they also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, they may not work at all.

Known Issues

• Too many searches in the search engine list
  
• "Open With" other browsers doesn't work
  
• The progress bar does not show if it's set to "Pop-up at the bottom"
  

Changelog

New Features

• Added EV certificate support
  
• Added root certificate update
  
• Added Notes synchronization
  
• Added opera:historysearch to default list of search engines
  

Core Fixes

• Fixed problems loading Gmail
  
• Improved XHR (AJAX) performance
  
• Fixed mouse gesture crash in print preview
  
• Windowless mode for Silverlight 1.1 now works
  

Mail Fixes

• Fixes to decoding of mailto: URLs
  
• Fixed crash when listing channels/rooms on IRC server
  
• Fixed problem when fetching feeds would freeze Opera for a long time
  
• Fixed problem where Opera wouldn't start for some users with old mail directories
  
• Optimized newsfeed download when users have lots of existing feed messages
  
• Fixed problem seen when changing the status of several messages at the same time
  
• Fixed several parse errors caused by IMAP server bugs
  
• Fixed problem adding contacts to messages when the contact has multiple e-mail addresses
  

UI Fixes

• Fixed crash when opening Help
  
• Some fixes to Opera Link synchronization
  
• Fixed problem saving pages in formats other than HTML
  
• MHTML files can now only be saved as MHTML
  
• Fixed problem where Personal bar was greyed-out sometimes
  
• Viewing source doesn't put the file in the system temp folder anymore
  
• Viewing source and applying changes to local files commits the changes to the local file again
  
• Fixed the internal "Execute program" command, which caused Open in buttons to stop working
  

Platform-specific

• [Windows] Fixed opacity inversion on web pages
  
• [Windows] Fixed GDI leak related to favicons
  
• [Windows] Fixed crash when closing Opera
  
• [Windows] Fixed printing issues where some words would run into each other
  
• [OS X] Fixed problem scrolling to the bottom of the pages using scrollbars
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX