Slightly ajar

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.