Erik's blog

We have an excellent developer relations team at Opera which does a great job and often have a better overview of things than a specific engineer. That said, you should always feel free to poke us engineers directly as well. Most of us are really friendly down to earth guys with a passion for our little corner of the Opera browser and happy to answer technical questions best we can.

If you ever find yourself at a conference talking to one of us or if you're emailing with us you'll hear the term core-integration-point being mentioned quite frequently.

Just to demystify it a bit, type in opera:about in the url bar and check under the heading Browser identification where you can find our (UA) user agent string.

Since I'm running Opera Next on Windows I get the following string

Opera/9.80 (Windows NT 6.1; U; Edition Next; en) Presto/2.10.255 Version/12.00

Looking at the bit saying Presto/2.10.255 you can read out that my version of Opera uses the Presto version 2.10 renderer and core integration points up to and including 255 are in this build.

A core integration point is simply put a single task one or more engineers within core has been working on. These tasks get assigned a number (sequentially) as it get accepted and integrated onto our mainline. It can be anything from for example "XMLHttpRequest Level 2" which is c-i-232 and which among other things enabled CORS for XHR, or it can simply be a package of bugfixes going into mainline.

All this is also described at length in Web specifications if you want to read more about it.

So the next time you talk to an Opera engineer, surprise us by knowing the secret handshake and say "Hey Erik, I just tried my cool WebGL app in core integration XXX and it seems like YYY is borked. You know anything about that?"

Looking forward to hearing from you...now I'm going to go check out the WebGL panel at SXSW!