Opera 10.0 Alpha 1

[Josh]

OK Folks, here it is, the long awaited Opera 10. Now, the changelog is posted below:

• Presto 2.2 Engine
• Performance boost
• 100/100 and pixel-perfect on the Acid3 test
• Auto-update
• Inline spelling checker
• Opera Mail improvements, including rich text composition and delete after X days
• Widget Improvements on Linux

Now, that said, the auto-update is nice and once again opera can claim to maintain a 100/100 on the acid test (as if it shows real world validity), but am I the only one who finds this "changelog" to be rather dismal? As I've stated in the past, I love opera, it is a great browser and I would love to use it full time, but when is opera going to let me make the browser TRULY "MY BROWSER"? I am not just talking about roboform, yes I would kill to see that in opera and hopefully the new "Selectors" support will allow roboform to tie into opera's DOM, but I wish I was able to add little things to help personalize my browser to the full extent. The problem right now is this, You can customize opera to almost any extent visually and can use UserJS for some ok tasks, but I really do not enjoy being limited to what a group of developers feel I should be using or how I should be doing my business on the web.

Anyways, enough of a rant from me, this is a good browser and I don't want to take away from all of the positives that this browser does offer (it is very fast), what are your thoughts? Were you expecting more from this release or series of releases? Of course this is an alpha, so perhaps they are holding back some MAJOR features from the public for now, but we shall see. To me, a major version increase means major features, which none of these really seem to be.

Thoughts?

[Paul Keith]

Definitely underwhelmed by the lack of features but a faster Opera is a faster Opera...nuff said.

[Ehtyar]

A closed source browser...nuff said.

Ehtyar.

[justice]

Heres more detail

Opera SoftwareChangelog for Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 for Windows
Changes Since Opera 9.62
Presto

Opera 10.0 includes the Presto 2.2 rendering engine. Detailed changes since Presto 2.1.1 are listed below:
Rendering

    * Significant performance improvements
    * Added Web font support, allowing the download of fonts specified in font descriptors in @font-face at-rules; TrueType (TTF), OpenType (OTF), and SVG fonts are supported (demos)
    * Achieved 100/100 and pixel-perfect rendering on the Acid3 test
    * Pretty-printing of unstyled XML (using unstyledxml.css in the Styles sub-directory of Opera's installation directory)
    * Added support for CSS3 RGBA color values (demo)
    * Added support for CSS3 HSLA color values (demo)
    * Added support for the CSS3 color: transparent value
    * Added support for the viewport meta tag key
    * Improved HTML5 support, including end-tag and start-tag parsing, whitespace parsing, and DOCTYPE parsing
    * CSS files must be served with the correct MIME type ("text/css") in Strict mode or they will be ignored

JavaScript/DOM

    * New regular expression engine, which greatly improves performance on regular-expression-heavy pages such as the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark
    * Added support for the W3C Selectors API
    * Renamed the objects returned by getClientRects() and getBoundingClientRect() to ClientRectList and ClientRect instead of TextRectangle and TextRectangleList, respectively
    * XMLHttpRequests will now trigger start-loading/end-loading events
    * Removed the proprietary window.setDocument method
    * Added support for the SVGElement.currentFps and SVGElement.targetFps properties to read and control, respectively, SVG frames per second
    * The load event for scripts is now sent after the script is executed rather than before
    * The load event is now sent to frame/iframe/object elements before it is sent to the document
    * A highlight will no longer be added when HTMLElement.focus() is called unless keyboard navigation is already activated

Other

    * Removed UTF-32 encoding support
    * User JS files will now be executed in alphabetical order rather than file system order
    * HTML5 canvas elements can now export images to the JPEG format
    * HTML5 canvas transforms are applied when building a path, not when painting it (this change is made to work like Mozilla)
    * The first ID (instead of the last) is now used on pages with duplicate IDs when navigating to fragment IDs
    * Added support for the altGlyph element in SVGs
    * Added support for 32-bit alpha in BMP and RLE-encoded BMP images
    * Implemented HTML5's algorithms for detecting charsets in HTML
    * The http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40 namespace is no longer treated as an alias to http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml

User Interface
Auto-Update

Opera now includes the ability to automatically update itself when new releases become available. By default, Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 will simply notify the user about available updates. Users can specify that snapshots should be downloaded by enabling Download All Snapshots in opera:config. Users can also choose not to check for updates or to automatically install updates by going to Preferences > Advanced > Security and changing the "Opera update level" setting.
Inline Spelling Checker

Spelling errors are now indicated as you type via a red underline in input fields, Opera Mail, and Notes. The input field context menu includes spelling suggestions, as well as the ability to enable/disable the spelling checker and change dictionary languages. Opera 10.0 Alpha 1 includes a U.S. English dictionary. Only multi-line edit fields check spelling automatically by default.

Opera 10.0 uses the Hunspell dictionary format. Installing dictionaries will become easier before Opera 10.0 is released, but additional dictionaries can be downloaded and installed now by copying the dictionary files (*.aff and *.dic) to the local dictionary directory. Opera will recognize the additional dictionaries after restarting. The dictionary directory locations for each platform are listed below:

    * Windows: $PROFILE\dictionaries\ (where $PROFILE is the 'Opera directory' in opera:about)
    * Linux/UNIX: $PROFILE/dictionaries/ (where $PROFILE is the 'Opera directory' in opera:about)
    * Mac: ~/Library/Application Support/Opera 10/Dictionaries/

Mail/News
Rich Text Message Composition

Opera Mail can now send rich text messages including inline images, styled text, links, and/or custom HTML. Forwarding and redirecting rich text messages now also works as expected. Rich text composition can be enabled by default for an account on the Outgoing tab of the account settings dialog by checking "Prefer HTML formatting". It can also be enabled on a per message basis in the message composition window.

Bold styling, italic styling, and underline styling can be toggled using Ctrl-B, Ctrl-I, and Ctrl-U, respectively.

Rich text message signatures are not yet supported.
Delete After X Days (POP-only)

Delete after X days automatically removes messages from POP servers after the specified number of days, which is particularly useful for users who have limited server space. This option can be enabled for POP accounts on the Incoming tab of the account settings dialog by checking "Remove from server after #days" (7 days by default). It's also possible to specify that only read messages and/or only fully downloaded messages should be removed.

Warning: Disabling the latter option is dangerous for those that use low-bandwidth mode, as messages that aren't completely downloaded will be removed from the server, making it impossible to retrieve the complete message.
Other Changes

    * When viewing a message, message subjects are now a text field again instead of a button
    * Added a Thread button to the message list toolbar
    * Added keyboard shortcuts for Go to Thread (D), Watch Thread (Ctrl-D), and Ignore Thread (Ctrl-Shift-D)
    * The encoding mismatch dialog has been removed

Miscellaneous

    * Network access for widgets is now opt-in. Thus, all existing widgets must be updated in order to have network access. All widgets on widgets.opera.com have been given Internet access. Network access is specified using the network attribute of the widget element. For instance, widgets that use <widget network="private"> will have Intranet access only. Widgets that use <widget network="private public"> will have Intranet and Internet access.
    * Dragonfly now selects the current tab automatically
    * Dragonfly now includes an HTTP inspector
    * Added support for TLS 1.2
    * SSL v2 and weak cipher support have been completely removed
    * Fixed numerous stability issues
    * Plugged numerous memory leaks

-http://snapshot.opera.com/windows/w100a1.html

[Josh]

Even with that list, those seem like features which don't warrant a major version change. I really wonder how many MAJOR new features opera has added to warrant them being at V10 already.

[justice]

very impressive is the webstandard webfont support try the examples here: http://www.alistapar...om/articles/cssatten

[allen]

Even with that list, those seem like features which don't warrant a major version change. I really wonder how many MAJOR new features opera has added to warrant them being at V10 already.

-Josh (December 05, 2008, 05:28 AM)

This is my impression as well. . . maybe they're fresh out of "big" ideas.

[hpearce]

I certainly don't notice any speed increase whatsoever .  Ss for development, Opera is too busy satisfying the wants of their "geeks" to address the serious reguests of their "normal" users.

Ohh, it passes acid3 test ... let me rush out and ditch the browser that does what I want for Opera instead.

[Josh]

AMEN! AMEN! AMEN!

Opera is so proud that they are 100% standards compliant that they neglect other functionality in favor of said compliance. What good is a browser to me if I cannot do with it what I want? OOOH! It renders pages as intended, but it still breaks others which is not of a concern to me as an end user, just that they display properly. It doesn't let me work the way I want by adding things to my browser which make MY LIFE easier.

[Lashiec]

It's an alpha guys, Opera Software has clearly stated the full feature list will be unveiled as 2009 rolls along. At least one thing it'll surely get is a redesigned GUI, hopefully a *new* one instead of a light facelift with a different skin. Jon Hicks is working on it, so I expect great things there.

As for the features, there's nothing other browsers already have, even in the web standards department, BUT, they included some things long desired by the majority of users, so props to them. Also, it may be just me, but it seems like they're changing Opera's development method quite a bit, rolling out big features with each major version (alpha x, beta y, etc.), and fixing bugs in the weekly builds, instead of fixing and rolling features as they go, like it happened before. More Firefox-like, which hopefully it will be better for the overall quality of the final product (so I don't have to rant again :P)

[Josh]

OK Lashiec, that may be the case, but after tracking opera since v5, I have noticed that most of the major additions to opera's major versions occur in the alpha/beta phase. If they were to add any of the things that a majority of the NON-Forum dwelling users want, it would surely appear in the alpha builds to allow bugs to be worked out, wouldn't you think?

[Lashiec]

Since Opera does not have a public roadmap or public discussion lists like Firefox, we can only make assumptions about where it's directed. But in the Choose Opera blog, they wrote:

Note that this alpha release is not intended to show off the full feature set of Opera. It is the first public release of the Presto 2.2 rendering engine, which will be present in Opera 10, made available so you can start trying out some of the new web technology support.

And the timeline shows that the Alpha version includes the changes in the engine, and the beta the new features. Why new features in the alpha version? My take is that they have been worked on for a bit of time. After all, one of the developers, Olli, talked about auto update and spell checking in Opera 10 back in October. Besides, with some of the features, it's key they work as intended, otherwise it would mean major problems, so they give them extra time.

Of course, that means future new features won't be as big as they could be, so maybe we can forget about extensions for now . Or not, we can only speculate at this point.

[Lutz_]

The 10 alpha works great for me; fast indeed.
The criticism about the lack of features does not seem warranted - please see the bottom of the page:
Opera:Next
The already added features are nothing to sneeze at either, or?

[allen]

So "new features" don't happen til Beta. Interesting.

I'm curious to see where they go, really hoping for a thorough GUI overhaul (so long as they don't deprecate the true MDI for standard tabs), things have felt convoluted, to me, for the last several versions.

I'm definitely noticing a speed increase and Gmail seems to be working in it better than in previous versions which is, for me, really something. Gmail was the biggest reason Opera wasn't serving as my primary browser any more.

[urlwolf]

But Allen, were you not using M2 as your primary client? (Oh, spell check works finally! ). Have you moved to gmail?

In my install of Opera 10 alpha the windows menu is gone; but you can still tile pages right clicking on the tabs.

The scrolling (one of Opera's best features) is kind of jumpy in 10.

The one gripe I have is that with Opera you never know if you are missing some functionality from a site; they are in fact the most incompatible browser on earth (baring text-only browsers). I don't think Opera 10 will fix this.

[urlwolf]

addenum: it may be that I'm using skrommel's speedKeys for the arrow keys and that screws up Opera 10's scrolling. It works fine on 9.

[allen]

But Allen, were you not using M2 as your primary client? (Oh, spell check works finally! ). Have you moved to gmail?

-urlwolf (December 06, 2008, 02:25 PM)

I was, indeed, using M2 as my primary client via IMAP, but the IMAP was a bit shaky and I really wasn't thrilled with opera's load time against my mailbase -- and rss updates or mail downloading would often cause Opera to grind to a halt until the operation was done. So I just threw in the towel and went to gmail directly. Might give M2 another go, see how it fairs in 10.