Slightly ajar

We've just released a public build of our testing and development build that shows Opera passing 100/100 in the DOM tests. It also has pixel perfect rendering. The final test which has to be passed is the performance test. This puts Safari and Opera neck and neck in the race to be the first browser to pass Acid 3. I'd like to congratulate the Core Opera team for all the work they've done to pass the first two tests so quickly, and the WebKit team for making this a fun race so far. Both engines getting this far means that we both support important CSS3 properties like HSLA color model and Web Fonts, and pushes support for SVG forward. I'm looking forward to when Gecko and the new IE engine get this far.

Swedish fashion labels have been hot recently, but Norwegian label, Moods of Norway are now joining them on the global scene. It was Oslo Fashion Week recently, and I was lucky enough to be invited to the VIP section of their fashion show at Bislett Stadium (venue of the 1952 Winter Olympics). There was reportedly around three thousand people there. It was certainly packed in the VIP section, and the whose who of Norwegian celebrities were there. Unfortunately, I didn't recognise any of them, so sorry if I stood on anyone famous' toe.

Moods and Opera have been up to a few things together recently. If you look around the Opera web site, you'll find one of the Moods founders in some of the photos. They're also doing a fashion show at our Rock Opera event at SxSW on the 10^th March. In one of the most enthusiastic display of blogging I've ever seen, they are like a rabbit out of the hatch with their blogging on My Opera. Their posts are as humorous as their advertising copy, and they seem to travel around the globe even more than I do. My favourite quote being I dont' know! The pink boat is almost so gay that it scares the gay dudes. Their pink boat is certainly very pink! The girls are less scary though.

It is a quite good fit that they are attending our Rock Opera event. While their normal clothes are popular over here, for some of their designs you'd have to be a rock star to get away with wearing it. Either that, or like to attract attention. It is probably no secret why then, that throughout their My Opera blog, you can see such stars as Dave Navarro (Red Hot Chilipeppers), Justin Timberlake (no accounting for musical taste), Tommy Lee, Perry Farrell (Jane's Addiction), some guy from the Black Eyed Peas, and Frank Zappa's so, wearing Moods of Norway gear. I'm looking forward to Jon Von Tetzchner sporting one of their nice floral numbers.

The new year is upon us, and what better way to start it than to create a wish list for the upcoming year. These will be mostly related to Opera, but also some in regards to web standards in general. These don't relate to any inside knowledge at all, and are just personal wishes.

Change the toilet seat

I'm running Opera here on my brother's PC (My Mac laptop died a sorry death on new years eve), on XP and the logo isn't so bad due to the icons on XP being so tiny and low resolution. It is a different matter entirely on OS X though, which is magnified more on Leopard, with the new dock that gives a shadow of the shadow, and a reflection of the reflection. Not to mention a reflection of the shadow and a shadow of the reflection. A icon probably needs to be more detailed, but as a logo mark how about a perfect circle, a red ring? Rings and circles have a lot of positive symbolism, are very recognisable, and are geometrically pure and minimal. A ring is also used in Japanese (a strong market for Opera) as the symbol for yes or correct, just as a tick is fin the West (while a tick means incorrect in Japan).

Promote our roots and heritage

Opera is both Scandinavian, and European. Being Scandinavian has one big disadvantage; the cost of doing business and the wages are high due to the cost of living, taxes etc. It does have big benefits though. Scandinavia is known for its technical inovation (as is Opera), with the likes of SonyEricsson, Nokia (ignoring the fact that Scandinavians would term Finland as Nordic and not Scandianvian), Saab and Volvo. That means there are many people with great technical ability here, and just as many close by in the rest of Europe. Arguably though Scandinavia is more famous for its design. Bang & Olufsen is the stand out name in terms of electronics, but there are many more from the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, home furnishings, music and so on. Names such as Ikea, H & M, and Absolut (whose bottle is a design icon) are probably house hold names around the world. And who didn't play with Lego when they were a kid? Of course, Europe as a whole is famous for its design or high quality goods. From Germany with its cars, to Italy with Fashion, Switzerland with watches an France with its wine and cheese. Did I also mention the Scandinavian women?

In some ways we are already moving in this direction. If you look at our feature list, it can often be described as maximilism instead, of the Scandinavian minimilism of its most famous design movement. But we've got some great new designers, that are doing some fantastic work, and we've recently worked with the photographer of Moods of Norway for the images on our new B2B section of the Opera web site. You'll even notice one of their founders in some of the photos. They're a small but up and coming fashion label that are very popular here in Norway, and stars like Gwen Stefani are fans.

I'd love to see us work closer with these kind of companies and creative people, and also come up with a design aesthetic of our own, which is both uniquly ours, but pays homage to our heritage, and design excellence of the region.

Deliver to top quality partners

In 2007 Opera delivered products to some of the biggest names. Nintendo, Vodafone, T-Mobile and Sony are just a small example. One partner I'd love Opera to have is the aformentioned B&O. It wouldn't do anythnig for our market share, as they ship low quantity, high cost items, but the combined innovation potential of both companies combined would be quite exciting. I can think of some great control methods we could do with their new programable, touch screen remote, and I can imagine they'd create a great minimalist interface. We also have the technology so that we could be included in their entire range, from TVs, to mobiles, landlines, music systems and even their car projects.

I'd also love to do something more experimental. Car manufacturers often create prototypes for the big car shows. I'd love to see Opera create a prototype browser for a company such as Saab, that shows how a browser could be integrated into a car, and even control the entertainment system and other systems. Being a prototype, it wouldn't have to be even functional, just design ideas. Opera has already shipped in aircraft seats, so there is no reason why it couldn't be included in cars too, especially with our voice control technology.

Opera Labs

Speaking of prototypes, we have a fairly new labs site. During the year we released a number of experimental builds, such as advanced SVG, canvas and video builds. It would be great to use this site more to show some of the crazy technology we are working on, and realease things like prototypes and experiemnts that perhaps couldn't be included in our flagship products. Experimenting with different interface styles for instance.

Faster, Safer, more Standards

We are probably industry leading in all these areas, but there is no reason why we can't improve even further. There is certain CSS3 properties that I'd love to see, and HTML5 has some interesting features. It would be nice to see core pieces of each spec ready, and implemented by the major browsers, by the the end of the year. It isn't possible for all of the spec, but in CSS3's case, it could include a couple of modules such as Backgrounds & Borders and Media Queries for example.

Developer tools

It is no secret we are building real developer tools. It will be difficult to rival the likes of Firebug instantly, as they've had years of development. We are commited to making good quality tools however and to improve them as they mature. I hope they ease issues with developing for Opera, and help improve our compatibility rate. Hopefully we can deliver some of that Opera innovation to the developer tool space.

The one true web to rule them all

There is a feeling in the air that we are in the mist of the beginning of another great browser war. Lets hope the Web wins this time, instead developers moving from the Web to alternative one vendor controlled technologies such as Air and Silverlight. It certainly looks that way with all the Silverlight sponsorship and booths they've been doing at Web conferences recently. Far more than promoting IE IMHO. I'd love MS to commit to adding to IE any feature that exists in Silverlight, or is planned to be, and is included in a Web standards, in a reasonably similar time frame. If Silverlight gets much more features for developers to use than IE, then it is natural developers will start looking at the shiny new toy. Silverlight is a nice rival to Flash, in a one vendor solution rival to another in the plug-in space, but if it becomes a rival to the web, then that is scary for everyone, except Microsoft. Ditto with Air.

I want the Web to win in '08 and not any commercial interest from either player.

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.