Anything & Everything...

Interesting work by Alex on handling cookie security issues in Opera and other browsers.

He talks about cookie setting limits and how that may be exploitable given you can force an overflow of cookie writes by taking advantage of Opera's (and Firefox) cookie limit. Also, makes an interesting point about Opera's speed:

The question is; can we win this race?

In Firefox, it takes approximately 100 miliseconds on my machine to set 1000 cookies over 20 hostnames, with 1 hostname per iframe. So we can win any race.

In my testing Opera is much faster at navigating between pages and setting cookies, however I'm still unsure if we can win this race in Opera.

Maybe one of the Opera devs can take a look at this and see if Opera needs to be tweaked to lessen any possible security risk. Not sure if he was using the current release or Opera v9.5 beta 2.

If you haven't discovered or used bookmark nicknames yet in Opera, don't wait!!

It's one of the fastest, easiest things you can do to speed up your browsing. It literally lets you rename the web to your own whims and habits. If you want to go to your own blog by typing in "b" this is how you do it. Or "n" for your favorite news site.

Any string of letters and numbers is at your disposal. Simply add a site as a bookmark and click on the "details" button and you'll see a nicknames field.

Given Opera's (new in v9.2, aka Merlin) Speed Dial™ feature, the numbers one through nine are assigned your Speed Dial sites, but beyond that, it's up to you. Also, shift-F2 opens a "turbo" nicknames field. This saves the <enter> keystroke for you, so even faster. (Note that I changed this to simply F2 in the keyboard manager in Opera.)

Even though Opera gives you a dizzying number of ways to accelerate your browsing, this will make your head spin given its simplicity.

• Speed Dial (from a new tab)
  
• Auto-complete in the address bar
  
• Nicknames (1-chars or more & without <enter> key using <shift+F2>)
  
• Trditional Bookmarks (in the Personal Bar or from the Bookmarks menu or from the Panel)
  

We hope to see a Nicknames manager in Kestrel (aka Opera v9.5) maybe, to help handle all the nicknames that pile up quickly in your bookmarks file. (hint, hint, ODT)

Interesting item by Daniel at Opera Watch about an interview with everyone's favorite CTO, Håkon, about the OLPC project ($100 Linux-based laptop with Opera for developing countries and their yearning, smarty-pants kids).

...But another item in the interview caught my attention.

Anne at Opera seems to working on and proposing a new video element object in HTML5 which would greatly simplify embedding video in web pages (without plug-in issues -- i.e., Flash, Quicktime, WMP, Real...!). WOW, great idea to evolve web standards as online video takes off! (As the product managers for each of the previously-mentioned plug-ins has smoke coming out of their ears.)

Give'em hell, Anne!

Hopefully this sort of free-thinking web development sentiment at PBS may be growing to avoid the pain of tweaking for various non-standard issues and idiosyncracies in various browsers...

We test our site in every browser we can get our hands on...

Of course, openmindedness, resources available, cost issues, development tools, thoughtful team leadership, general awareness (Isn't Apple going out of business? -- somebody actually asked me that about a year ago -- or What's Opera and Firefox?) all come into play here.

Wow, Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's esteemed CEO and co-founder, says that Opera Mobile™ will be BUNDLED with Windows Mobile 6 on various mobile phones. Looks like Safari/iPhone isn't (ergo "won't be") the only fully-functional mobile browser capability, eh? (Infoworld)

Of course, you can still download Opera Mobile™ now, if you can't wait.