sixteen nights

IE is moving its renderer from GDI to DirectX, which can utilize GPU acceleration. This is an awesome improvement that smooths all animation and scrolling and offers better text rendering. Its script engine is also getting a massive overhaul, and by the performance improvements shown, I wouldn't doubt that they're going down the same path as SpiderMonkey, V8, and SquirrelFish.

Opera is also pursuing a similar path with the Vega rendering engine and the Carakan Javascript engine. If IE improves this much, then I can't help but be optimistic about Opera.

[An Early Look At IE9 for Developers]

Opera's User JavaScript, or UserJS, is somewhat like Greasemonkey on Firefox. I believe Opera should work on how they implement the UserJS interface, because as of now, it's buried in the options and many users probably won't find it. Read how to setup UserJS to start.

UJS Manager
One new aspect of UserJS comes from the new Opera Unite application, UJS Manager. After giving UJS Manager control of your UserJS directory, it will show you a list of your scripts in which you can enable or disable the scripts. If the script is specially formatted for UJS Manager, you can even edit some variables in the script.

Another feature of UJS Manager that I find very useful is script installation. If you open a script file in opera, UJS Manager will insert a bar at the top of the page with a button to install the script. Once setup, UJS Manager makes Opera's UserJS experience much more easier and friendlier.

Now that I got UJS Manager out of the way, here are the scripts I currently use regularly.

Autosizer 2
Shrink large images to fit in the window.

/b/ackwash fork'd
Show the original post when hovering over reply references in 4chan.org-style sites.

Google Reader - Compact, Clean & Tweaked
A user style sheet for Google Reader turned into a script so it doesn't apply to all Google sites. It gets rid of all the extraneous parts in Google Reader.

No Click to Activate (direct link)
Does some magic so you don't have to click first on every flash video (and other embedded objects).

Open in background with long press
Click on link and hold to open the link in a new background tab. I use this with Google Reader and a few other sites where I want to open several pages to read later.

HTML Ruby
Shameless self-promotion on this one. Renders ruby annotation, popular in websites for some subsets of Japanese culture. Might also be useful if you're studying Japanese.

SerialNext
Another script of mine that enables Opera's FastForward feature for pages with a serial url, like /images/1, /images/2, etc. With this, you can just press the space bar to advance to the next page.

Youtube Downloader
Adds links to download Youtube videos in FLV and MP4 formats.

Microsoft has chosen to implement a "ballot screen" that offers a choice of browsers for Windows 7 users in Europe. This wasn't my favorite solution to the problem, and in fact, I still am mildly opposed to this solution. To me, Microsoft went beyond the call of duty, and the fact that Microsoft bowed down this low to appease the EU is surprising.

And here comes Opera's CTO, complaining about the inclusion of logos in the ballot screen.

"We're not sure about the use of logos," Lie said. "The blue 'e' has become so associated with the Internet in general, due to the bundling with Windows. We think using the blue "e" might not be such a good idea."

I'm sorry, but I think this is ridiculous. Opera cannot afford to go down this road of what is whining in my mind. There are reasons why Opera remains a minor browser in many minds, and it's not all because of the low recognition. Comments in the TechFlash post and others around other tech sites show that others do not support this. What Opera needs to do is to make the power of the Opera browser accessible to the masses, not to complain on Microsoft's generosity.