Things here in the Desktop Team have been very, very hectic lately as we approach Kestrel Beta 2. The good news it that the wait is almost over.

Introduced in this build is a new fraud protection back-end. It's better, more reliable and allows us to block malicious sites more quickly than ever before. Fraud protection is now enabled by default.

For all of you non-native English speakers out there, most translations are included in this snapshot. Of course, someone will have to tell you what this blog post actually says for you to get the snapshot.

So download it, enjoy, and submit your feedback.

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 324643] "Remove from toolbar" doesn't work
  
• [Bug 324645] Right-clicking an IRC channel prevents it from showing new messages
  
• [Bug 322553] The "Execute program" action fails in certain circumstances
  
• [Bug 324678] Mail attachment options don't work on Windows
  
• [Bug 324696] The "Go to Web Address" action fails
  
• [Bug 324699] Crash when choosing "Open Opera" from the tray icon after hiding Opera on Windows when the mail client is disabled
  
• [Bug 324700] "Save image" context menu item doesn't work
  

Changelog

• New fraud protection back-end
  
• Enabled fraud protection by default
  
• Setting an external source viewer now works properly
  
• Open with... for other programs now works properly
  
• Starting without tabs works again
  
• Several security UI improvements
  
• Opera Link: Fixed a bug where notes would not be synced when you upgraded to a build that supports syncing them
  
• Opera Widgets: Fixed form submission
  
• Opera Widgets: Fixed opening links in iframes
  
• Paste & go doesn't open the address in the background anymore
  
• Added a special menu for selected text which is a link
  
• Spatial navigation now properly uses text selection for links
  
• Made address field focusable from an empty workspace
  
• Fixed find in page from the Find in page search field
  
• Increased number of lines in the address field drop-down
  
• Removed encoding of slashes when opening local files
  
• Fixed print preview of mail and pages with iframes
  
• Large plain text documents are no longer cut off
  
• Fixed an issue with using bookmark nicknames as your home page
  
• Fixed progress bar when set to pop-up at bottom
  

Mail

• Top-level account access points can now be selected via the mouse and show all messages for the selected account
  
• Better icon for e-mails without bodies
  
• Saved passwords are now indicated by the text "Click to change password" instead of six asterisks
  
• Fixed IMAP authentication/connection issues
  
• Fixed problem downloaded POP mail when using "Leaves messages on server" on certain servers
  
• Removed confirmation dialog when unchecking "Leave messages on server" for POP accounts; all messages on the server will automatically be removed
  
• Better labeling of "Delete" button
  
• Fixed problem where messages on the server are redownloaded after importing mail
  
• Download message bodies before exporting
  
• The default account when sending new messages is now chosen more intelligently
  
• Added confirmation dialog when deleting newsfeeds
  
• Fixed issue where the spam filter would not learn from its mistakes
  
• The Mail panel button now correctly indicates new mail
  
• Re-added message body settings for newsgroups
  
• Stopped generating plain text version of newsfeeds that contain HTML (and vice versa), which makes photo newsfeeds more usable
  
• Fixed long-standing issue where deleting drafts from the Drafts view while the compose window was open would render the draft unusable
  

Platform-specific

• [Windows] Tray icon now indicates when new mail has arrived
  
• [Windows] When hiding Opera (Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H), a tray icon is created
  
• [Windows] Fixed DCC transfers on Windows
  
• [64-bit Linux] Fixed a crash when saving things
  

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

We released 9.27 today, which addresses a few security and stability issues, plus a print fix on Mac. This release is a recommended upgrade for all those running the latest stable releases.

Changelogs are available:
Windows
Mac
Linux/UNIX

Go download it!

While working on the last few remaining issues we have with the Acid3 test, one of our testers discovered an easter egg in the test. Over the weekend our developers have hunted down more of them and worked around the clock to improve our score as you see in this screenshot:



One of our core developers was especially impressed with the quality of the easter eggs: "I've never seen this well obfuscated ECMAscript code, it is clear that the language now is mature enough to compete with C and Perl".

Opera's Chief Web Opener David Storey, tells us he is thrilled that the race for points has broken the psychological barrier of 100/100, crossing his fingers that even imaginary numbers might be within the reach of Opera and WebKit developers now fighting for the lead in Web standards compliance.

Mozilla Inc. was not available for comment.

This week we've been working on performance on Windows and Mac painting. You should see performance increase by 2x to 10x on heavy DHTML pages. Performance increase depend on the test page, graphics card, and OS used. To see the improvements for yourself, compare the previous snapshot to today's release on the following test cases:

Performance test 1
Performance test 2

Under XP, with a AMD 4600+ X2 CPU and a NVidia 7600 GT gfx card, I see a 9x performance increase. On other graphics cards and OSes, the performance improvement will differ.

It's worth noting that this optimization is in painting performance and might not yield similar improvements on regular web pages without DHTML or other graphics intensive operations. We have also done some performance optimizations in Javascript garbage collection and memory allocation of ECMAscript objects, which should be visible on all platforms.

Many of the Acid3 fixes we've made are still undergoing testing and further development, so you will not see Kestrel achieve the same pass rate on Acid3 for the time being. If you want to test our GOGI build for ACID 3 compliance, head over to the Opera Labs.

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

• Opacity is inverted on Windows.
  
• Opening Help will cause Opera to crash.
  
• "Open With" other browsers doesn't work.
  
• Save As for a web page only lets you save as "HTML file" on Windows.
  
• The progress bar does not show if it's set to "Pop-up at the bottom".
  
• On OS X, scrolling to the bottom of a page with the scrollbars does not work.
  
• GMail might not load.
  

Changelog

• Several download fixes
  
• Fixed funky parsing problems on YouTube.
  
• All downloads and saved content (except web pages) are now put in the transfer window for easier access
  
• Viewing source should now work properly with applications that need a file extension to work
  
• UNIX: Fixed a Flash crash
  
• UNIX: Made the mplayer plug-in draw itself in the correct size again
  
• UNIX and Mac: Fixed various command line bugs
  
• Calling substr with negative length now returns an empty string
  
• Array indexOf now treats a non-numeric second parameter as 0
  

Mail

• Fixed problems expunging or moving messages on certain servers
  
• Fixed issue where the "Contacting Folder" status message displayed the wrong count
  

ACID3 fixes

• Zero bytes in encodeURIComponent and encodeURI are now handled correctly
  
• Unicode escapes can no longer be used to put non-identifier characters into identifiers
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Two days ago Opera reached a 100/100 pass rate on the Acid3 test for the first time and we published a screenshot on the Desktop team blog to back the claim. Lars Erik Bolstad, the Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, now announces the first public build with a 100/100 pass rate and pixel perfect rendering!

Read more and download the special builds linked to in the article!

We have some excellent news! Lars Erik Bolstad, the Head of Core Technology at Opera Software, sent me the following information to share:

I have a quick update on where we are with Acid3.
Since the test was officially announced recently, our Core developers have been hard at work fixing bugs and adding the missing standards support.
Today we reached a 100% pass rate for the first time! There are some remaining issues yet to be fixed, but we hope to have those sorted out shortly.

We will release a technical preview version on labs.opera.com within the next week or so. For now, the screenshot above shows the Acid3 test as rendered in our latest WinGogi Desktop build. WinGogi is the Windows version of our reference builds used for the internal testing of Opera's platform independent Core.

It's been a while since our last snapshot build. Some things fell apart while others were shaping up nicely - so we are very happy to show you some good improvements 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.

Known issues:

• Opening Help causes Opera to crash.
  
• There are some funky parsing problems on YouTube.
  
• "Open With" other browsers doesn't work.
  
• Save As for a web page only lets you save as "HTML file" on Windows.
  
• The progress bar does not show if it's set to "Pop-up at the bottom".
  
• On OS X, scrolling to the bottom of a page with the scrollbars does not work.
  

General changes:

• Fixed inline find.
  
• Fixed downloading attachments in the new Yahoo! Mail.
  
• Fixed async XMLHttpRequest to never be blocked by a slow script.
  
• Fixed internal plugin methods not accessible from javascript engine when data attribute defined.
  
• Fixed an issue where new mail messages would not be detected.
  
• Opera Mail now handles mailto links with encoded characters correctly.
  
• Improved handling of subscription to temporary subscription to news groups.
  
• Fixed some offline mode issues.
  
• And lots more of stability fixes!
  

Acid3 fixes:

• getSVGDocument is now supported in an iframe.
  
• createDocumentType now throws an exception for malformed qualified name.
  
• Fixed NodeFilter returning true => 1.
  
• Fixed HTMLTableRowElement.rowIndex and .sectionRowIndex returning undefined for table rows created via DOM.
  
• HTMLButtonElement.type now defaults to "submit".
  
• Fixed form control collection not indexed by name when outside the main document tree.
  
• Fixed Range.surroundContents().
  
• Fixed insertNode to not collapse range.
  
• Fixed removeNamedItem() and removeNamedItemNS() to throw a not-found error.
  
• Fixed NodeIterator to function well also under dynamic changes.
  
• Fixed Date.UTC() to do proper 1900 year offsetting.
  

Windows-specific:

• Better performance with plugins.
  

Mac-specific:

• Shift+space for Page Up works again.
  
• Function keys work again.
  
• Opera now uses the proper OS X Downloads folder by default.
  
• Changed the icon in alert and prompt dialogs to something prettier.
  

UNIX-specific:

• Fixed crash when closing tab with Flash.
  
• Several plugin fixes.
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

Enjoy the new build, and Happy Easter!

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.

Here's yet another snapshot build. This build fixes a few outstanding download issues. In particular, we now respect filename suggestions in content-disposition: attachment headers. Testing is needed, however, as this build will introduce some download regressions. We've already caught some internally, but there are probably others.

We've also updated search.ini a bit in this build:

• Removed Yahoo! Shopping, Yahoo! Answers, Google Groups, Opera Support, and Download.com searches
  
• Added Wikipedia and Google Images searches
  

Known issues

• "Open With" other browsers doesn't work
  
• Save As for a web page only lets you save as "HTML file" on Windows
  
• Unable to print pages with objects or iframes
  
• Some downloads do not appear in the transfer manager
  
• Inline find stops working after entering one letter (using Ctrl/Cmd+F still works as expected)
  
• Keyboard input is problematic for some people on Mac
  
• The progress bar does not show if it's set to "Pop-up at the bottom"
  

Changelog

• Fixed IMAP and POP synchronization problems
  
• RSS items that are already read are not shown in the notification anymore
  
• It is now possible to set Opera as default mail application from Control Panel
  
• When right-clicking in Speed Dial search field you you can easily reach the "Search options"
  
• Fixed cut-n-pasting bookmark folders
  
• Fixed selecting or creating a new bookmark file with Sync
  
• "Save to download folder" works again
  
• Context menu in transfers panel now work again when no other tabs are open
  
• Content-disposition: attachment filename suggestion now respected when saving files
  
• Fixed saving multiple files from the links panel
  
• Some initial implementation for flipping scrollbars on RTL web sites (to permanently flip, enable opera:config#UserPrefs|Left-handedUI)
  
• Fixed problem finding new POP messages when using the "Leave messages on server" setting
  
• Better search results when using Quick find in Opera Mail
  

Windows specific:

• File open/save dialogs are resizable again
  
• Fixed a crash on startup on Windows 98
  

Mac specific:

• Opera now works again in Mac OS X 10.3.9.
  
• Fixed scrollbars to not loose their blue color
  
• Fixed unread count in Dock icon
  
• Some stability fixes to plugins
  

UNIX specific:

• Prevent GTK from changing the global locale settings - this would occasionally make text disappear or shrink on web pages after using the GTK filechooser
  
• Autoscroll/pan now appears where clicked, not in middle of page
  
• Fixed plugin detection for .1 and .5 builds
  
• Several more plugin fixes
  

Download
Windows
Windows Classic
Macintosh
UNIX

This build demonstrates the plugin work that has been done recently. Most of this work is not visible and is only testable through regression testing: compare with an older build and see if something broke. A lot of this work is cross-platform, so we would appreciate feedback on plugins on all platforms. Note, however, that a lot of the bugs around plugin detection are still unresolved, so this work is only testable on the plugins that you can actually see.

On *nix these changes are combined with a bunch of bug fixes and redesigns. First of all, libnpp.so is now built into Opera and all known plugin bugs that result in Opera crashing are resolved (including using 64-bit Opera with 32-bit plugins). We added a work-around for the Flash player crashes with r48 and a lot of other fixes. Please retest any issues you have had with plugins and report back on the relevant bug reports what you find. If you find any new bugs: report, report, report! We really do want to make Kestrel the best release for plugins ever on *nix. Note that although most of the work has been focused on Linux, the work so far is *nix platform independent: more work on FreeBSD and Solaris is planned. Please also note that because of the fix for the 64 vs. 32-bit issue, this release is incompatible with previous pluginwrappers. There are also some fixes that will affect Java, so we are interested in feedback on that as well.

Have fun and enjoy!

Known issues

• Cut'n'paste and drag and drop a bookmark folder will make it disappear
  
• "Save to download folder" is broken
  
• Format selector when saving pages is broken.
  
• Inline find stops working after entering one letter (using Ctrl/Cmd+F still works as expected).
  

Changelog

• Fixed text selection when selecting from bottom left to top right
  
• Crashing plugins should no longer crash Opera on Mac and Windows. Please test.
  
• Fixed crash when opening certain files (especially PDF files)
  
• Fixed crash when changing interface language
  
• Some changes have been made to the tab mode "Activate first tab opened from current tab" (whose name might change in the future): If you open several tabs in the background from one page, Opera will remember that they are related and will switch focus between them when you close one of them. In the previous weekly you had to close the parent tab before this occured.
  
• "Activate tab to the right" preference now works on UNIX and Mac. The mode described above still doesn't work.
  
• Windows: Tray icon is now gone if you don't have mail enabled
  
• UNIX: Made Flash 7 work again
  
• UNIX: When closing a tab, flash animations in other tabs will not be killed anymore
  
• UNIX: And a lot of other plugin fixes
  

Mail

• Really delete associated messages when deleting accounts
  
• Fixed crash when downloading IMAP mail sent from Outlook
  
• Attempt to clean up ghost messages on start-up
  
• Fetch more than 50 messages at a time from IMAP accounts
  
• Fixed unread count inconsistencies
  
• Fixed problem with subscriptions for nested IMAP mailboxes
  
• Fixed problem getting all new messages for IMAP accounts
  
• Fixed problem with stuck IMAP connections when fetching headers/messages
  
• Better synchronization handling after waking computers on Windows and OS X
  
• Decode body parts before indexing them
  
• Fixed overzealous IMAP expunging
  

Mac

• Fixed quadruple mouse click
  
• Fixed Event.ctrlKey and Event.metaKey with onkeydown
  
• Fixed plugins
  
• Emacs-style keyboard shortcuts are back
  
• Reactivated the asynchronous draw timer
  
• Fixed an issue with Java disabling minimization and quitting
  
• Fixed a very common crash related to plugins and links with anchors
  

More details about the Mac-specific fixes are available in the new Mac Team blog.

Download

• Windows
  
• Windows Classic
  
• Macintosh
  
• UNIX