A Blog From Behind the Trenches

Today we released a new Opera 12 "Wahoo" snapshot with full ECMASCript (JavaScript) 5.1 support.

Now that we've added proper ES 5.1 support, including things like strict mode, the test262 test suite looks much better in Opera. However, you may notice that one of the tests fails. As it happens, this particular test seems to be invalid, so it is supposed to fail in browsers with a proper implementation.

And this highlights a point I made a couple of months ago when yet another "benchmark" from Microsoft's marketing department was making the rounds on the web:

The test262 test suite still isn't finished, and there may be faulty or invalid test cases in addition to all the test cases that have yet to be written.

It might be tempting to portray the test262 test suite results as the final word on ECMAScript 5.1 compatibility, but that is far from the case. In fact, there may be other faulty tests in there.

I hope all Opera users out there will be careful not to misrepresent the test results!

In my opinion, the main focus when discussing ECMAScript 5.1 and test262 is how great this is for interoperability. With all the major browsers implementing the same standard and aiming to conform to the official test suite, interoperability on the web will be be greatly enhanced.

So don't get me wrong. If you had the impression that test262 is of no use, this is far from the truth. It will be a great tool to aid interoperability as it develops further, and more tests are added and invalid tests are fixed or removed.

It's just that it goes beyond mere marketing. It's going to be an important tool to keep the web open to all.

A few days ago, I asked on Twitter whether people are actually switching between multiple keyboard setups in Opera, or if just having one set available with overrides for specific shortcuts would be sufficient.

I got quite a few replies, but it's difficult to get a proper overview and discussion going between multiple people. To perhaps get a better discussion going, I thought I would move the discussion to my blog instead.

I would really like to know what the uses cases are, if any, for being able to switch between two or more custom keyboard setups. Personally I use the "Opera 9.2 Compatible" shortcuts with some customization, and of course with single-key shortcuts enabled. I never really needed the ability to switch between multiple setups.

I also added a poll to the right to get a quick overview of the numbers.

Any thoughts?

The financial results for the 1st quarter of 2011 are in. Once again, this was a record quarter for Opera Software. Even with the negative currency situation, the quarter resulted in record revenue and profitability.

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A few years ago, we showed off hardware acceleration support in Opera. Now the time has finally come for you to try not only that, but also our brand new WebGL implementation. Head over to the Core Concerns blog to download the Opera Labs build and post your feedback.

Since it seems that people are having some problems getting it working, I thought I would mention a few things you should keep in mind.

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We released the first snapshot of Barracuda (AKA Opera 11.10) yesterday. As you can see, the focus has been mostly on bug fixes so far, although most people seem to be eager to try some new features.

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It seems that Mozilla will refuse to fix their browser so that it gets a 100/100 score on the Acid3 test. Instead, they have decided to explain not only why they won't, but also claim that it's actually a good thing.

Fine. That's their call. But calling it "mythbusting" while spreading myths of their own? That's not very nice, now is it?

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The first official news of 2011 from Opera is Opera for Tablets. At present, not much is known about it, but Digi.no managed to dig up some details the rest of the press seems to have missed.

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The financial results for the third quarter of 2010 were announced today.

Even though the currency situation is still affecting our revenue, we managed to deliver solid revenue and profits, making this our best quarter ever.

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The site patching blog had a new update last week about a type of problem that seems all too common:

For some time we have seen compatibility issues because Opera supports both addEventListener and attachEvent. In some cases this causes scripts to be run twice, in other cases attachEvent is simply used as an IE-detector, causing Opera to run the wrong codepath or get IE-only stylesheets or other bad things.

So what are you going to do when you are, in a way, being "too compatible"?

Well, with Browser JS we can test possible changes to Opera's core while still being able to quickly remove the changes if they turn out to worsen things.

But once again, this shows how incredibly complex site compatibility is. There's no silver bullet. Even trying to be "too compatible" can cause problems!

According to IntoMobile, a group of European mobile operators have concluded that iOS, Android and other such operating system are "trojan horse" that are stealing away the operator's direct relationship with their customers, and therefore vast revenues.

They are apparently planning to meet in early October to discuss the problem.

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