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Opera 10 Alpha 1 Released, Aces Acid 3 Test 258

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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Opera 10 Alpha 1 Released, Aces Acid 3 Test

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  • by Anonymous Coward
    Opera was last spotted moving across the country [wikipedia.org] in a technicolored school bus called the "Further."
  • by cptdondo ( 59460 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:18PM (#25994527) Journal

    Perhaps the submitter could have benefitted from those.....

    • by Khuffie ( 818093 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:27PM (#25994673) Homepage
      In my defense, I DID spell 'sign' right. It's not like the spell checker would have caught it...
    • He could have done with some factual correctness too.
      1) Opera 10a1 doesn't pass ACID 3. In order to do so, it must complete the test with each segment taking less than 0.0333s on an average machine. On my (fairly above average) machine it takes 10 seconds for the whole test, and locks up for 5 seconds mid way through.
      2) To get the WebKit that does pass ACID3, you don't go to google chrome, you go to the nightly webkit build at nightly.webkit.org. That engine doesn't have google's slow JS engine, so it pa

  • Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)

    by LingNoi ( 1066278 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:20PM (#25994545)

    The acid test is important but what about important things for users..

    Other features include a spell checker and auto updating.

    Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?

    • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Informative)

      by Stuart Gibson ( 544632 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:24PM (#25994615) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by maxume ( 22995 )

        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: (Score:3, Informative)

            by boredMDer ( 640516 )

            'Besides which, ... mouse gestures, etc are hardly world-rocking features. It doesn't affect the user experience much if they aren't there.'

            Indeed, until you start using them. They make the browsing experience better overall.

          • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Interesting)

            by AVee ( 557523 ) <slashdot@a[ ].org ['vee' in gap]> on Thursday December 04, 2008 @05:10PM (#25995207) Homepage
            I will never go back to a browser without mouse gestures. No other browser feature affected my user experience as much as that one. Not even tabs (but perhaps that's because I've often used a separate virtual desktop for the webbrowser).
            • Re:Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2008 @05:47PM (#25995711)

              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!

              • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                by afidel ( 530433 )
                Try a clean profile, there might be something wrong with yours. I keep 99 days of history and even with 20+ tabs open in FF3.0.4 with 9 addons installed I'm only using 151MB on a 2GB XP SP2 machine.
            • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Funny)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 04, 2008 @06:50PM (#25996569)

              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.

            • I will never go back to a browser without mouse gestures.

              Interesting. I'm just the opposite. The first thing I install for a browser is Vimperator [mozdev.org] so I don't have to use the mouse.

            • I will never go back to a browser without mouse gestures.

              I rather think the same thing about my OS. That is, I won't ever go back to another OS without mouse gestures and spell checking and grammar checking and all the other system services I want to install. Are mouse gestures any less useful in music jukebox software or e-mail clients? Opera introduces inline spell checking in this release, but still ignores the inline spell checker offered by OS X as well as the grammar checker, thesaurus, dictionary, mouse gestures, etc. Implementing these features at the app

          • A spell check might not affect your experience but it does for anyone reading your (not parent) posts.

            • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

              I can't tell if you're trying to criticize my spelling or not... :/

              At any rate, I never felt a need for spell check. Chrome's spell check just annoys the piss out of me, because 99.9% of the time, it's wrong. I'm spelling something legitimately, but because it's not in the rather limited dictionary, it gets flagged. For the spelling on my posts, I guess I've always just been one who gives my post the once-over to make sure that there aren't errors.

              • I'm not criticising your spelling however there will be times when I am on forums and it's just obvious who it posting from internet explorer..

        • Re: (Score:2, Redundant)

          by aliquis ( 678370 )

          Though, Opera really IS the best browser still even if it lacks inline spell check (which I have just recently started to use anyway.)

      • by qoncept ( 599709 )
        And then it un-made up for it by being an oddball browser that next to no one used (and at the time had ADS??).

        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.
        • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)

          by moderatorrater ( 1095745 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:54PM (#25994981)

          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.

        • by elcid73 ( 599126 )

          In other words- "I don't care about standards at all, just one company's interpretation of them. We can't control what these companies are going to do with their products, so we might as well just go along with one of them, standards be damned. Oh, lets do that under the guise of 'open source' to sound sanctimonious about it- that way we can all be chained to a single company's interpretation, allowing developers to be lazy (saves money for companies hiring developers! yay!), but we still reserve the righ

          • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

            by pizzach ( 1011925 )

            I don't care about standards at all, just one company's interpretation of them.

            It's not the interpretation of one company. Do you know what W3C stands for? World Wide Web Consortium. Do you know what consortium means? "An association of companies for some definite purpose."

            Yes, that means that people from Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apples' Safari, Mozilla's Firefox, and Opera's Opera all take part in it. Many of the features that are introduced and later get standardized start as propriety features of one browser. Examples are the rounded CSS borders in Mozilla, Text field r

            • by elcid73 ( 599126 )

              You missed my sarcastic "in other words..." from the OP. Anyway, that's my point. The OP I was responding to made a comments implying that browsers competing and how small browsers that no one uses aren't relevant or worthwhile- that they divert developer cycles.

              (The part you replied was in sarcastic quotes) was that if we had good, realistic standards, it shouldn't matter what the browser looks like or does. I think competition is great in the browser market- I think a "small, niche browser" is perfectl

            • by rsidd ( 6328 )

              The "one company" that the parent was referring to was MS, not W3C. Read the grandparent for context.

        • by elcid73 ( 599126 )

          Oh- and the "next to no one uses..."

          So what? Again, if the standards are there browser makers could all agree on them, what difference does it make if next to no one uses it?

    • by CaptainPatent ( 1087643 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:26PM (#25994649) Journal

      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!

      • what security holes? did you even RTFA?

        the malware was designed to target Firefox, but it doesn't exploit any known Firefox vulnerability. also it's a trojan [wikipedia.org], meaning the only way you can catch it is if you are tricked into downloading it and executing it, or if it is downloaded & executed by another piece of malware. if you have malicious code running (with read/write privilege) on your system, then your system is already compromised at that point. therefore, it doesn't really matter where the malware

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?

      Funny, considering most other browser alway feel like an old version of opera to me. Especially Firefox.

      Honestly the only thing Firefox has going for it over opera is the plugins. Which I dont entirely trust.

    • by elcid73 ( 599126 )

      Right, those are important features for sure, (arguably two of the most important), but to classify Opera has being "behind the times" as far as feature sets is inaccurate at best.

    • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mobby_6kl ( 668092 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:47PM (#25994881)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?

      Different software packages have different features? Details at 11!

      Opera's had spell checking through ASpell for a long time. The new inline spell checking (as Firefox has had) is indeed a huge improvement.

      Opera also has had a half-assed auto-updater for a long time. It would automatically and silently patch its local JavaScript (used for site compatibility fixes), but when a new rev appeared, it would merely direct the user to the

      • by adolf ( 21054 )

        Please tell me more about this thing you speak of, this "local JavaScript (used for site compatibility fixes)."

        Because when I read that the first time, all I saw was "LIES." If Opera is able to silently and transparently modify specific web sites so that it is able to render them properly, then who is to say that it's actually capable of properly doing all of the things tested in Acid 3?

        This is sounding a little like when ATI was silently tweaking their drivers to have specific settings which were automati

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Other features include a spell checker and auto updating.

      Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?

      This being Slashdot, I'm sure you'll be amazed to learn that no, it's not true!

      I'm using Opera 9.62 right now. It has a spell checker, which wants to turn Slashdot into "Slashed" and doesn't like the word "Firefox."

      It has an automatic update checker. It doesn't automatically download and apply the update for you, but it'll tell you when a new update is available and send you straight to the download page which is close enough in my book.

      Both Opera and Firefox have a "Check for Updates" menu item in the "Hel

    • Re:Meh.. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MobileTatsu-NJG ( 946591 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:59PM (#25995045)

      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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Actually, Opera had a spelling checker before Firefox. The thing that is new is that this is now an inline spelling checker.

      As for automatic updates, Opera has had those in some form for years as well. I think the new thing here is that it actually performs the update itself if you let it, and I don't believe Firefox does that yet, does it?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by mini me ( 132455 )

      Every Cocoa application gets spelling and grammatical checking for free on OS X. Having to include it at the application level does seem rather ridiculous.

    • Re:Meh.. (Score:4, Informative)

      by CNERD ( 121095 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:51PM (#25997249) Homepage

      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]

  • Yes, but... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by snl2587 ( 1177409 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:22PM (#25994589)

    ...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.

  • by clone53421 ( 1310749 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:22PM (#25994593) Journal

    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).

    • Mod parent up. We can wibble on about Acid tests all we want, but we still have a 750lb* gorilla in the room.

      *Yes, MS have lost a little weight recently, haven't they?
    • by Phroggy ( 441 ) <slashdot3@@@phroggy...com> on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:48PM (#25994895) Homepage

      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.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by mixmatch ( 957776 )
        Sure, IE8 will help, but there is still the problem of penetration. IE7 was released over two years ago [msdn.com], and still has less than 30% penetration [w3schools.com]. IE6 is still being used by around one in five users, and it has outright horrifying CSS rendering. Unless there have been drastic changes since the release of IE7, this is what can be predicted for the next few years of browser usage:
        - IE6 usage will continue to decrease at a rate of 1-2% per month, putting it between 5-8% by the end of next year.
        - IE7 will cont
        • Chrome poses the biggest threat to FF growth should a final version be released in the next year.

          HAHA! Wait... that was a joke, right?

          We're talking about Google... gMail is still in beta!

    • I don't agree. Acid tests certainly aren't the end-all be-all that some assume they are, but they're useful. They're benchmarks for browser developers for measuring whether their browser is adhering to standards. They are not the only benchmarks, but when everyone is passing Acid2 and Acid3, then someone can come up with Acid4 (or some other different benchmark) to deal with some of the remaining issues.

      From a web developer perspective, you're right, IE is still a bigger problem, and relative to IE, Aci

      • Acid tests certainly aren't the end-all be-all that some assume they are, but they're useful. They're benchmarks for browser developers for measuring whether their browser is adhering to standards.

        Yeah, but for the vast majority of us they're completely irrelevant... it's pretty cool to be able to claim "my browser scores better than your browser does!", but it means nothing in the grand scheme of things.

  • Acid3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bunratty ( 545641 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:23PM (#25994613)
    Scoring 100/100 on the JavaScript subtests is only part of passing Acid3. A browser also has to render the page correctly (including the proper favicon) and complete each subtest within a certain amount of time. From reports in the Opera forums, it looks like Opera 10 still isn't passing the performance aspect of Acid3. I think Safari 4 is still the only browser to fully pass Acid3.
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Blice ( 1208832 )
      Midori for Linux also passes Acid3 with a 100/100... Just say "Webkit" is the only engine to pass Acid3..
      • I can't wait until Midori [twotoasts.de] can remember open tabs and not crash constantly. I can't wait for a fast, lightweight, and cutting edge browser to be available for linux once again.
        • by Blice ( 1208832 )
          Sigh, me neither.

          Honestly I can deal with it not remembering what was open last time, but the segfaults.. fffff. I use it still though, for light browsing. I use Firefox for flash. Inconvenient but Midori is so much smoother/faster/nicer :/
        • Same here. Midori crashes so much that it's unusable in its current state. I'm waiting for Chrome for linux. :D
    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Fweeky ( 41046 )

      WebKit nightly, best of 6 runs (several failed at 98%):

      Failed 0 tests.
      Test 65 passed, but took 35ms (less than 30fps)
      Total elapsed time: 1.18s

      Opera 10 alpha:

      Failed 0 tests.
      Test 26 passed, but took 46ms (less than 30fps)
      Test 69 passed, but took 27 attempts (less than perfect).
      Total elapsed time: 0.62s

      Not doing too badly. Test 69 failed on one of the WebKit runs too, but I guess a random nightly is gonna be worse than a scheduled alpha release.

  • by Rinisari ( 521266 ) * on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:24PM (#25994621) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Items of note (Score:5, Informative)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:33PM (#25994735)

    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.

    • One could, if it were me, would say the same for OS X.

      Pun aside, you are using an ALPHA software - it's not even a beta! Believe me it will be better.

      - From someone who switched from Firefox 3.1alpha1 today, and who has never seriously used a Mac.

      • One could, if it were me, would say the same for OS X.

        One could what?

        Pun aside, you are using an ALPHA software - it's not even a beta! Believe me it will be better.

        I'm sure it will be better by the time it is finalized, but we don't know in what ways and the alpha doesn't bring a whole lot of hope for features that concern me. You might note I was comparing it on speed and compliance to a nightly version of Webkit... not even an alpha.

        From someone who switched from Firefox 3.1alpha1 today, and who has never seriously used a Mac.

        Both Opera and Firefox are a lot better on Windows and Linux than on OS X. They both tend to ignore all the cool bits of OS X that make it nicer than other OS's in particular respects. I mean, Apple goes and implements a

        • Well the pun was on your last line. As I said, I have never seriously used OS X, so I won't know particular problems on it, but otherwise, here on Windows and Linux, Opera is much much better when compared to Firefox or IE.

          If only some one would port top 10 Firefox extensions to Opera...

          • Now if only IE would fix their flat tires and get back in the race.

            One could, if it were me, would say the same for OS X.

            One could what?

            Well the pun was on your last line.

            Maybe I'm obtuse. I still don't get it. I didn't say anything about someone could anything and I don't see a double meaning for a word if you're trying to make a pun (as you say). Would you mind explaining?

    • by Phroggy ( 441 )

      Now if only IE would fix their flat tires and get back in the race.

      IE is definitely back in the race, but they have some catching up to do. When it's released, IE8 should be a pretty decent browser, by last year's standards. It passes Acid2 and everything.

    • Opera historically had a very fast JS interpreter, but they still don't compile to bytecode, and definitely don't do any JIT, which is why the new generation of JS engines are overtaking them.

      Of course, no browser with JIT is out of beta yet, so comparing them now is rather pointless. We still don't have the expected feature list for Opera 10, and they may well decide to replace their JS engine in it - it is an alpha, after all, not a beta, which implies that more major features may be added.

  • No border-radius? *sniff*

    Is it specified in some stupid way like Mozilla & Webkit do it?

  • It looks like it still doesn't implement any kind of local storage.
    A feature that other browsers have for years, including IE since IE 5.5.

    No big improvement in their Javascript engine either.

    And Dragonfly is still way behind Firebug and Web Inspector.
    Opera used to be great, it was ahead of time in the Mozilla Firebird days. But nowadays they seem to fall behing other browsers. Plus Opera is closed-source and there's even no NetBSD/OpenBSD/DragonflyBSD blob. Plus it used to be fast and light compare

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jugalator ( 259273 )

      No big improvement in their Javascript engine either.

      It has much better performance in a Sunspider test than Opera 9.6x.

      But nowadays they seem to fall behing other browsers

      It's not feature complete, the website hint at more coming especially sometime during january 2009. Also, this summary and many comments here are missing out on major feature additions like SVG font and web font support, and the CSS improvements. Too much focus, as usual IMHO, is given on Acid3 scores.

  • by eddy ( 18759 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @04:59PM (#25995039) Homepage Journal
    I hope that's something you have to explicitly enable, because I won't be upgrading if I'm forced into some horrible rich-text editor. I hate those. Colored text in different sizes, vertical bars instead of proper > quote indicators, and animated smileys, I crave these like I crave my penis falling off from leprosy.
  • Nested tabs please! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Twinbee ( 767046 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @05:30PM (#25995511)

    I love Opera more than any other browser out there and use it all the time, but wake me up when it starts to support nested tabs. There was a post by a Firefox user not so long ago who mentioned such an addon. People are rightfully raving about this time saving feature (and similar addons).

    Tabs are grouped hierarchially according to where they are opened from in the form of a tree, but they can be expanded if need be. Tab names can be fully seen (instead of just graphical icons), and a whole branch may be closed (e.g. a site + its sub pages). A massive space saver when you are working with loads of sites.

    I posted a message on the Opera forum. One can but hope:
    http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=257296 [opera.com]

    • I love Opera more than any other browser out there and use it all the time, but wake me up when it starts to support nested tabs.

      Yeah, nested tabs are a great idea. Also, they should steal resizable text fields from Safari, man that's hard to lose when using other browsers.

    • by eddy ( 18759 )

      I requested pretty much that [opera.com] almost exactly five years ago. Most comments then showed that people really didn't get it. Maybe they're more mature now. Maybe I'm just bad at communicating my ideas.

      • by Twinbee ( 767046 )

        Interesting. Your idea is pretty much what I thought of before I came across this plugin.

        The advantage this has over our idea is how any arbitrary tab could become a group. Opening a new link in a new tab would created a child tab under the current one. This does away with the hassle of manually grouping tabs (though the plugin I'm talking about will allow you to do that too).

    • by ozphx ( 1061292 )

      Yeah IE8 does single level of that with colors, which IMO is enough, and I loved the hell out of it (as im a compulsive middle-clicker when tracking information down, and I just want to kill everything in that browsing "tree").

      If Opera (my usual browser) supported that, then I would be a happy man.

  • $ bzip2 -dc opera* | tar vxf -
    $ cd opera*
    $ ./opera
    Segmentation Fault

    Alphatastic.

  • When is Opera Mobile 9.5 coming out of Beta? Is Opera following the Google model of leaving things in permanent beta?
  • by TodLiebeck ( 633704 ) on Thursday December 04, 2008 @07:15PM (#25996873) Homepage

    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.

    • It seems to be fixed in Opera 9.61 or 9.62 - I'm using 9.62 here, and I cannot reproduce your problem on your sample page.

  • I'm glad to know about this new beta, but frankly I care a lot less about perfect ACID scores than I do a workable solution for blocking ads. And I'm not talking about the lame ass right-click-block-content function, I want a solution that will block ads across my browsing experience, like the Firefox Adblock Plus extension.
  • I've been an Opera fan for a long time now, but it's wearing thin. Sure, they pass Acid whatever the fuck, but more and more sites just aren't working right with it anymore.

    It's very frustrating. Today, to my knowlege, there is no browser which I can easily configure to ALWAYS pull pages out of my RAM cache, no matter what, I don't care what the web site said. I get deeply frustrated when my 3000 megahertz machine with 2 bajjillion bytes of RAM takes even a full second, let alone three or

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