Slightly ajar

Later this month in San Francisco, Opera will be holding a launch event with free drinks and two top indie bands from L.A. I'm working from the Mountain View office for the rest of this month, so I'll be there taking in the music in the front row. If there are any web designers or developers reading that are in the Bay Area then let me know and I may be able to set you up with free tickets. I'd also love to help you with any browser compatibility issues while I'm in the area.

The bands playing are the 88 and the Binges, and it should be a great night. If you don't get free tickets, enter the My.Opera competition at this address. Did I mention that there is a open bar? As well as great music, free drinks and cool Opera announcements, there will be a lot of top people there - and me.

Congratulations to the Safari team on the beta release of their browser on Windows. Welcome to the party. It's a great day for Opera. Of of the reasons why it is so good for Opera is web standards. Many web developers don't test in Safari as it was only available on Mac. With another standards aware browser available on Windows it reinforces to developers that standards matter. Especially to the crowd that just test on IE and Firefox, and assume that Firefox equals web standards. This leads to many issues where developers use Mozilla extensions to the DOM or Mozilla bugs without realising it. In many cases, sites that break in Safari break in Opera and the other way around. I know there has been work I've done that has benefited Safari, and I'm sure that developers that find issues in Safari will also help Opera (providing they don't use browser sniffing to just give Safari the fix). I'm active now and again in the WebKit bug tracking system, and I hope we can work closer together both ways in the future. This kind of work benefits every body. Safari have been fairly quiet n the browser community of late and it'd be nice to change that. It is not only important to work closely with the Safari team, but also the IE team and the Mozilla team. To be honest, the IE team have probably been the most helpful recently, and we are building great relations there.

Safari have been laying down the smack, with the claims of the fastest browser. The results they show, particularly hi-lighting the HTML rendering speed (Which I personally think JavaScript speed is more important these days) don't look too flattering to Opera, but as always you can take these sorts of results with a grain of salt, especially as Safari have been optimising for iBench. Use another test framework and you'll probably get different results. None of this takes away from Safari being a great product. WebKit is a very nice, fast, standards compliant rendering engine. But, while we often keep things close to our chest, we are not standing still on the development of Opera. While the speed comparisons were done with Opera 9, we are well into the development of Opera Kestrel. Opera has always been fast, and it is a design goal of both Kestrel and Peregrine to improve the speed further. I believe we are making good progress in this. We have a target to aim for now. As quoted in the Opera Desktop team blog, The Kestrel falcon is able to see ultraviolet, which helps them spot prey while hovering 10-20 meters over the ground., while The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest creature on the planet in its hunting dive, the stoop. Just like Apple, Opera has innovation in its corporate DNA. Many of the new features found in the new Safari were first found in Opera, such as sessions, and we'll continue to innovate at a fast pace. I think it is an exciting time, where there is some strong competition in the desktop space that drives the industry forward.

I look forward to working with the Safari team and the other vendors to solve compatibility issues, and hopefully we can sit around a table soon to discuss this. Sharing test cases is one area where we can work together, as well as setting a baseline in what standards we implement to drive the adoption of important standards such as the mature parts of CSS3. Congratulations again to the WebKit team on a fine product, and to Apple for what looks like a really exciting Leopard release.

While it is probably well known within the SVG community (or not judging by the number of SVG sites that block Opera, and tell the user to download Firefox), there is maybe a lack of awareness in the web design community at large about just how many strides Opera has made in its SVG 1.1 support. As this test from Jeff Schiller states:

In roughly a year, the Opera browser went from being one of the least usable SVG implementations (no scripting/DOM support) to the best native implementation and achieved a higher score than the famed Adobe SVG Viewer

Opera has the best native SVG support of any browser on the market, and is only beat out by Batik 1.7 (great work guys) for the most compliant engine. Things don't stand still however, and I've already blogged previous about support for using SVG as a background image and list image in CSS in internal builds of Opera Kestrel. This is not the only improvements however. Kestrel will also support:

• Support for using SVG files in the image element
• SVG Tiny 1.2 vector-effect [Spec]
• SVG Tiny 1.2 navigation [Spec]
• SVG Tiny 1.2 handler [Spec]
• Speed improvements and optimisations
• Many general bug fixes of our support of animations, text, SVG DOM methods and filters

Not only that, but Kestrel is still in active development, and there will be further support for SVG added before it goes final. But for much of this one doesn't have to wait until Kestrel goes into public beta. This is because The Internet Channel for Wii includes some of the modules from the Kestrel branch of our core rendering engine. This means that some of our improvements, both to CSS3 selectors and SVG 1.1 are already out there, sitting next to your TV, ready to be checked out. Bare in mind that the Wii is limited to two fonts, so visual results may vary. Go check it out and see what you think…

New to SVG, or want to check out some techniques? Go check out our tutorials on Dev.Opera.

I previously reported that all CSS3 selectors were implemented in an internal build of Opera, but seven of these were disabled in the builds due to various issues. While this is still the case with the very latest builds, there has been progress with the two selectors that were labelled as buggy on the CSS3 selectors test. The previous results were as follows:

From the 43 selectors 34 have passed, 2 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 460 out of 578 tests)

The latest results are now as follows:

From the 43 selectors 36 have passed, 0 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 464 out of 578 tests)

I'm fairly confident that when the seven unsupported selectors are turned on we will pass all of the tests. Now to concentrate on other bugs and features…

Johan Borg, the Desktop Team Manager at Opera, has just recently announced the code names for the current and future versions of the desktop Opera browser. Most people will be familiar with Merlin (Opera 9) and a few people will have heard the name Peregrine (Opera 10), but Kestrel (Opera 9.5) was largely unknown outside Opera.

The first time I found out about the actual meanings of the names was late last year when we had a seminar in a Norwegian log cabin. I asked Johan who came up with the codenames as I thought it was hard to make them any more geeky. After all Merlin is a magician in King Arthur and Peregrine is a Took from Lord of the Rings right? I wonder if it was just me that thought that. Johan said that it was him that came up with them and they were actually types of falcons. It turns out there is much more to the names they are also names of WW2 Rolls Royce engines, for planes such as the Spitfire and Hurricane. Knowing the meaning breathes new life into the names and I think they fit much better.

Birds of prey are very suitable codenames names for Opera. They give a personality that I think the Opera O lacks. I remember way back at @media, Cindy Li of AOL mentioned that she'd done an illustration of all the browser vendors getting along, but didn't include Opera as she couldn't think of any way to personalise us in the image. The falcons do this, but also have many attributes that Opera shares with both the birds and the engines.

• Speed. Birds of prey are very fast, especially the Peregrine Falcon, which is the fastest creature on the planet. The Opera engine is also incredibly fast -- powering probably the fastest desktop browser available.
• Size. In order to fly at high speeds falcons have to be fairly small and light weight, with a low body fat ratio. One of the reasons Opera is so fast and works on many small devices is its compact efficient engine.
• Eye sight. Birds of prey have incredibly good eye sight, as you may have guessed by the term eagle eyed. This allows them to spot prey from great distances. Opera has best in class zoom features enabling people with less than great eye sight to be able to read pages, or people far from the screen, such as when using the browser as part of a media centre.
• Strength. Falcons have to be strong for their size to be able to combat their prey. The falcon series of engines powered some of the greatest fighter planes of all time, that created a defensive shield that protected great Britain to great effect in the Battle of Britain, and many other conflicts. Opera's great security record and measures to protect user security make a safer browsing environment.

As Johan mentioned, Kestrel will include rendering improvements from Peregrine, so you may not have to wait as long to see the CSS3 advancements I've been playing with on this blog, but nothing has been confirmed in which release all features will be added. As the Peregrine Falcon is the fastest creature on the planet, I'm looking forward to seeing if performance enhancements can be found to speed up the browser any further. With a lot of talk about Opera on mobiles and devices, the desktop browser is sometimes overlooked, but it has a very exciting future and is progressing at a impressive rate.