David Storey - Kestrel spreads its wings on test flight

Kestrel spreads its wings on test flight

Tuesday, 4. September 2007, 13:43:30

SVG, kestrel, JavaScript, CSS, Opera Mini

Earlier today Opera Kestrel finally took its first test flight outside the Opera offices. There have been a number of new features added, but the big news for developers is the updates to the engine that went into making Core-2.

As Kestrel is just in Alpha, Core-2 isn't quite finished yet. There will be further bug fixes, and possibly feature enhancements before it goes golden. Now is the time to give feedback if there are any major bugs that are affecting you, or engine features that you can't live without. Regressions are particularly important to fix.

I'll leave you to play with the Alpha, while I finish up the article and demos of some of the new features that I've been playing around with. There is a lot to test out, such as JavaScript getter and setters, SVG through CSS, getElementsByClassName, CSS3 Selectors, overflow improvements, text shadows, background-size, HTML5 enhancements and many more.

You can download Kestrel here and also check out the latest beta relese of Opera Mini while you're at at.

Dev.RelationsSome demos to check out Kestrel's new capabilities

Comments

Øyvind Østlund # 4. September 2007, 14:12

Do I understand it correctly if I say that Opera 9.5 now supports partial SVG Tiny 1.2, while on Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 the support has been “turned off”/no support? And an extra question I guess you can’t answer, will there be hope for any SVG support at all on Opera Mini 4 in the end? It would have been a lot of fun to play around with.

Alexis Deveria # 4. September 2007, 14:35

I'm sure you've already discovered the bug in the CSS SVG example I created...(top and bottom bars don't appear, while they do in stand-alone file) but I'll file a bug report just in case.

David Storey # 4. September 2007, 15:01

Fyrd: Yes, I noticed that, but didn't get time to reply. I've got my own SVG example using rounded corners, but the article isn't quite ready to be published yet. The image is much simpler than yours however.

NoteMe: Yes, that is correct. i can't comment on future plans for Mini yet. SVG with animations would probably be difficult due to the client server approach.

Alexis Deveria # 4. September 2007, 15:27

@David

Mine was purposefully complex to see if I could exactly emulate the multiple backgrounds in Safari example...still good to see it almost works.

I was working on a rounded corner example too, but was having trouble allowing a 100% width, since it causes the stroke to be cut off on the edges. With the individual images I solved the problem using transform="translate(-36,-36)", etc., but that's no good for a single rect element.

I'll be interested to see if you've found a solution for this without resorting to 99% or scale(0.99) or something.