Slightly ajar

Never letting being late get in the way of a good story, I'd like to celebrate the launch of Opera 9 this past Tuesday. During the launch I was away in Germany at the World Cup match between England and Sweden. It was a great match but I was a wee bit guilty that I was there having a great time while other people were slaving away with the big launch. Although along with Mike, I've put a great deal of work in trying to get sites ready for the launch, be it through contacting sites, patching or working with developers on their issues in Opera 9.

Site patching is a difficult business as we like to give sites time to respond before applying a patch or user agent spoof, so not every patch needed for major sites was included for the launch, especially as we've been away in recent weeks to meet with developers, but they will be applied in the coming days. User agent spoofing can also cause unwanted side effects, such as a recent change with masking as Mozilla on my.yahoo.com. While this fixed three issues it was put in to fix, it broke another part of the site, where links now always open in a new tab due to the use of a Mozilla only property.

I've seen a number of of forum posts by people that say Opera 9 was not ready for launch, and indeed there are some issues reported by web developers I've been working with that have not been fixed. Although there are some issues, there will always be bugs in even the simplest of software applications (and a browser is far from being simple), and as the old adage goes real artists ship. While I'm sure everyone would have liked more time to work on Opera 9, it is a much better product than Opera 8 and we had to ship it sometime. I think the benefits of releasing it now outweigh the cons. Having the browser out there in the wild as a none-beta product will push developers that only support released products to add support for Opera in sites that require Opera 9 such as rich text editing or sites that broke due to a bug in Opera 8 or below. Opera was also delayed slightly due to the great effort put in by the developers to add support for DOM level 2 style such as document.stylesheets. This is used by a lot of important sites and I for one am glad we managed to get it included for the launch. I think I'm right in claiming that Opera is now the first browser to support all of DOM Level 2. That is a big thing and a few bugs shouldn't overshadow it

Not that bugs are unimportant. Far from it. Work continues on fixing known bugs and important ones will be included in the first point release of Opera 9. I'm still talking with sites and script authors on fixes that are needed on our and their side to work in our browser. I'm confident important open issues will be fixed soon. Nothing should detract from what is a top quality product, in my opinion, and the passing of the ACID 2 test and our support of the DOM level 2 spec is testament to the quality of our rendering engine and our commitment to web standards and a open web.

After partying with Monica and co, It's time I sign off and get some sleep, I've got a web to open in the morning…