Tuesday, 4. September 2007, 13:43:30
SVG, kestrel, JavaScript, CSS
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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.
Tuesday, 28. March 2006, 13:13:07
addEventListener, DOM, JavaScript, Apple
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You may remember if you've been following my blog that a bug in the way other browsers implement addEventListener causes Opera problems in many web sites as they assume the broken behaviour. I updated that post to mention that Geoffrey Garen at Apple has reported to me that they have fixed this in WebKit. The issue has also been reported here in the Mozilla bug tracking system, and Jonas has stated that they will also fix this bug.
What does this mean for Opera? Well initially nothing, as all the broken scripts will still be broken, however once the browsers start rolling out with these fixes in place all new browsers will break on these scripts. The authors will begin to notice what we've been telling them all along and they will have to fix their scripts or not work at all in any new version of the browsers that support this method.
I'd like to thank both Apple and Mozilla for looking into this issue. The browser is quite a unique market where even though we are rivals, there is a lot of friendly co-operation between vendors and generally very little hostility. The WHATWG is a good example of this cross browser co-operation. While everyone wants to be the best browser, with the best standards support, no one will use them standards unless a majority of the other browsers also support it (unless your name is IE). Therefore you are in a strange situation where you want your rivals to improve their product so that people will actually start using the cool new feature you've just added. However strange this is, it is good for the industry and good for users as co-operation pushes the web forward and keeps it from splintering further into many single vendor solutions
WIDGETIZE