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Opera 10 Alpha 1 Released, Aces Acid 3 Test
Posted by
timothy
on Thursday December 04, @04:13PM
from the now-it-sees-all-the-spiders-and-tastes-color dept.
from the now-it-sees-all-the-spiders-and-tastes-color dept.
Khuffie writes "It seems that the upcoming version of Opera 10, of which the first Alpha has recently been released, has already passed the Acid 3 test with a 100/100. The only other rendering engine to have a complete score is WebKit, which can be seen in Google Chrome's nightly build. Opera 10 Alpha 1 will also finally include auto-updates, inline spell checking, and see some improvements to its built-in mail client, including much-requested rich text composition."
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In-line spelling and grammar? (Score:5, Funny)
Perhaps the submitter could have benefitted from those.....
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Re:In-line spelling and grammar? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)
The acid test is important but what about important things for users..
Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I guess it made up for it by having tabs, mouse gestures, speed dial, spatial navigation and dozens of other things before any of the other browsers.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
By that standard, Mosaic is the best browser ever, as it added inline images before most other browsers existed.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No. This analogy fails. It has nothing to do with Opera implementing stuff first, it has to do with them making up for lack of certain useful features by having their own useful features.
Besides which, spell check, mouse gestures, etc are hardly world-rocking features. It doesn't affect the user experience much if they aren't there.
Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)
I'll second that. Literally the very first thing I do after running Opera the first time after I install it is enable the mouse gestures (which happens automatically the first time I use one, which I do the first time I open a new page).
The mouse gestures in Opera, combined with the address bar search shortcuts, make Opera the fastest browser for me to use.
The fact that they keep releasing new versions before I've even had a chance to really put the previous one through all of its paces is equally impressive.
I've never missed auto-updates in Opera. It sort of annoys me with Firefox when I run Firefox and before it opens it installs a bunch of updates, including updates to plugins, then asks me if I want to keep using the plugins, then destroys the previous session I was going to load and shows me a page telling me that Firefox was just updated. It's nice that I'm always running the latest version of Firefox, but I don't always *need* to run the latest version, and I don't really like seeing that process as often as I do.
I could also harp on the memory usage with Firefox, but not only is that discussion out of place here, but it's been really difficult to find the reason why my version of Firefox sucks up all available RAM and other people I'm talking to running the same plugins (Firebug, AdBlock, Forecastfox) on the same sites don't see that. It doesn't change the fact that Firefox uses a ton of RAM, but it's hard to place the blame when it's not repeatable. But for reference, right now Firefox is using 344MB RAM, 397MB virtual with only 27 mins of CPU time. It has 2 tabs open to the same website. Opera is currently using 224MB RAM, 297MB virtual with 10 tabs open (including the same 2 as Firefox), with a total of 13 *hours* of CPU time compared to Firefox's 27 minutes (I already restarted Firefox once today; I think I restarted Opera a week or two ago). Again, it's hard to find the reason why Firefox uses so much RAM, but that doesn't change the fact that it does.
So anyway, yeah, mouse gestures rock!
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Funny)
Same here dude. It's awesome for browsing porn, plus the fact if you gesture forward (with the mouse, ahem) on a page of thumbnails it will cycle through the linked images.
I actually emailed Opera after an all night drunken 'test' session to tell them how awesome mouse gestures were and they sent me a t-shirt and a note of thanks. Obviously I told them I was cycling through hubble deep field pictures and not some hubba hubba deep feel pics.
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition is almost invariably a good thing for users, but in the case of web browsers, all it does is force the developers to add countless new "features" to "stay ahead of the competition" instead of spending that time making it do the things it already does the way it should.
Like passing the ACID test? Like giving you a start page that's ridiculously useful? Like making tabbed browsing work? Like making sure that everything runs in its own process?
What exactly would you like to see the browser do better? It seems to me that they're refining things faster than they're adding features.
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Informative)
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Behind the times? (Score:5, Funny)
Other features include a spell checker and auto updating.
Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?
So Opera is a little behind the times...
Personally I can't wait until they get around to implementing horrendous security holes [slashdot.org] as a subset of its features!
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Re:Behind the times? (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:Behind the times? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you can't live without spellcheck in submission spaces in a browser (which I no longer can after using this feature in Firefox since implementation) I understand that was and should have been a determining factor. At this point and for reasons of that particular feature though, they should be judged on equal ground. Additionally and as I pointed out, another factor for a lot of people should be security. I personally am considering switching to Opera (or at least downloading / running side-by-side to Firefox) now that it has a much larger feature set and for the time being seems to be more secure.
I just think the argument of "but this already has those features" is an argument borne of fanboyism alone and the browser should be judged on full merits. Opera for that reason looks pretty good right now.
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Opera had spellcheck since about forever, just not one that would underline the incorrect words like Word does. And it also isn't nearly buggy enough to require frequent automatic updates, so clicking the occasional prompt once a new version is available (detected automatically) worked just fine.
However, I'm disappointed that they finally bent over and decided to include HTML mail.
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Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?
Now you know how Opera users feel every single time there's a FireFox upgrade story.
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Re:Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)
No. If you have Opera 9.x and Aspell installed right click on any text area and you'll see "Check Spelling" as an option.
http://www.opera.com/browser/tutorials/spellcheck/index.dml [opera.com]
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Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
...is it smooth? I thought that was part of the criteria for passing the test, not just the 100/100 thing.
Still, congratulations to the Opera team. Now for Acid4, whenever that comes out.
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Acid is just a dick size comparison anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
From a user's perspective: Yes, it's cool to pass the Acid tests, but unless one of my favourite websites breaks in Firefox (or IE, for the less geeky among us), I really won't care.
From a developer's perspective: Until the really atrocious browsers (*cough*IE*cough*) get up to standard, developers will continue to have headaches coding for cross-browser compatibility anyway. Currently, you have to test for "IE" and "everything else" (ok, so you need to test in all the non-IE browsers for completeness' sake, but if it works in one of them it's very likely going to work in all of them).
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Re:Acid is just a dick size comparison anyway... (Score:5, Insightful)
From a user's perspective: Yes, it's cool to pass the Acid tests, but unless one of my favourite websites breaks in Firefox (or IE, for the less geeky among us), I really won't care.
If both Firefox and Opera pass the Acid tests, then there's a very good chance that your favorite web sites won't break in either of them. Passing Acid3 is not a reason to switch to Opera. Passing Acid3 removes a reason why you might not want to switch. If you're perfectly happy with your current browser and have no other reasons to consider switching, feel free to ignore this announcement.
From a developer's perspective: Until the really atrocious browsers (*cough*IE*cough*) get up to standard, developers will continue to have headaches coding for cross-browser compatibility anyway. Currently, you have to test for "IE" and "everything else" (ok, so you need to test in all the non-IE browsers for completeness' sake, but if it works in one of them it's very likely going to work in all of them).
Internet Explorer 8 passes Acid2; Microsoft is definitely working on getting "up to standard". Neither IE nor Firefox pass Acid3 yet, but it's definitely a goal that Microsoft and Mozilla should be aiming for. The purpose of the Acid tests is to highlight areas where some browsers don't precisely adhere to W3C recommendations; if these issues can be corrected in the browsers, so that all browsers behave the same way, then developers' lives will become MUCH easier. Indeed, as you point out, the current situation is that you only really have to test for IE and "everything else"; this is a dramatic improvement from the days of testing for IE on Windows and IE on Mac and Mozilla and Opera and Safari, and there would be significant differences between all of them. IE8 will mean a huge leap forward in cross-browser compatibility, and the Acid tests are one reason why.
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Acid3 (Score:5, Interesting)
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Using it (Score:4)
I've been using it all day (Ubuntu 8.10, gcc4/qt4) and I've not encountered any major setbacks or bad renderings. There's some graphical distortions on the tab bar, but I have a feeling that's a purely cosmetic, chrome issue which could be resolved with a quick flick of the wrist.
Really, I think Opera is slowly becoming my browser of choice for day-to-day activities. It's just faster than Firefox or Safari or Chrome. I'd like to see it get the process separation abilities of Chrome and the extensibility of Firefox, and it would be awesome. I still use Firefox for development, though, because its market share is much, much higher and the tools are there (Firebug and Web Developer, plus Venkman, etc.).
However, the mail client and feed reader are still lackluster. Thunderbird does a better job of the former, Google Reader handles the latter better. If Opera could act as a frontend to Google Reader, I'd be a very, very happy man, and so would thousands of others who like desktop applications with web-based backends.
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Items of note (Score:5, Informative)
Okay I gave the OS X alpha a spin. It does get 100 on the Acid3, but still doesn't manage smooth animation on my machine and probably not on the reference hardware. Javascript performance is behind compared to the latest Webkit and the Sunspider test. On my machine the Opera alpha is very slightly slower than the release version of Safari and about six times slower than the nightly Webkit with the new javascript improvements. The alpha does support some OS X system services, but still fails to use the default spelling and grammar checking, instead offering only a proprietary spellcheck that ignores my carefully trained dictionaries that work in most all of my other programs.
It's nice to see Opera is still in the game and trying, but it feels like they're still falling behind in the new, turbocharged browser race. Now if only IE would fix their flat tires and get back in the race.
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Acid3 != Standards Compliance (Score:5, Interesting)
Just tried it out, and of course it passes ACID3 as advertised. I still can't recommend this browser on the grounds that it can't correctly render absolutely positioned CSS elements, as demonstrated by the following code:
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Resize your browser with the vertical handle!</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="position:absolute;left:20px;right:20px;top:20px;bottom:20px;background-color:lime;">
<div style="position:absolute;left:20px;right:20px;top:20px;bottom:20px;background-color:red;">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Hosted version of the above:
http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/operacss/ [nextapp.com]
Opera 9.50, 9.60, and now 10.0alpha will not render the above properly if the browser is resized vertically. (9.27 and prior work perfectly) On the initial render, 9.5/9.6 and 10 do fine, but the moment one resizes the browser vertically (and NOT horizontally as well), things go awry. I reported this to their bug tracker six months ago, and posted a thread on their forums 2.5 months ago: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=250572 [opera.com] Have also mentioned it in their 9.6-about-to-be-released-post-non-working-sites thread.
This bug has additional consequences for AJAX applications that make use of on-screen measuring using offsetWidth/offsetHeight information. In such cases, even the initial rendering can be seriously flawed as offsetHeight returns incorrect values. (Note: offsetXXX properties are not part of a proper W3c standard, but are universally supported).
Apologize for the quasi-rant, but I just don't want to see another bug report about how our applications don't look right in a supposedly ACID3 compliant browser, thus indicating that the problem "MUST" be our fault. Please realize that passing ACID3, while a neat accomplishment and generally good thing, is far from a guarantee of standards compliance.
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Re:Acid3 != Standards Compliance (Score:4, Interesting)
That looks like a corner case situation to me. Maybe you would do better by not inflating the importance of bugs you report? :)
I strongly disagree. It breaks valid, commonly-used layouts and is quite difficult to workaround.
The example case is as simplified as possible to demonstrate the bug. I too don't think the example scenario will be hit very often. I think most people use the lower-right corner handle rather than bottom/top handles to resize a window, or simply use the maximize function. I used this example because it easily illustrates the issue.
The underlying problem however seems to come up quite often in my experience. Working around it has proven between difficult and impossible because all height data in the browser is incorrect (not current). It appears height data is not recalculated until the browser is *horizontally* resized.
There's quite a bit more information in that my.opera.com thread if you're interested.
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