443 replies to this topic 9 votes

[+Mephistopheles]

Smarter address field suggestions

We have already introduced address field search suggestions powered by our partners Google (default), Bing, Яндекс (Yandex), and Wikipedia (English only). Now we want our own address field suggestions to meet the same high quality standards as the ones provided by our partners for your bookmarks and history entries.

In our old system; everything including bookmarks was matched against page URL, title, or page content and then ordered in one giant list sorted by last visited time.

The new system assigns a score to each suggestion based on more factors than just the last visited time. For example, we prioritize your bookmarks, the position in the URL where we find a match, and the number of times we get a match on the page.

We are not done yet, and will work on integrating Speed Dials and further improve the scoring system.

What do you think about the new results in the address field? Are we getting you to where you wanted to go?

PS: There are some other treasures in the change log as well.

Known issues

• Mail header layout is broken
  
• Mac: File uploading, and large network requests never finishes
  
• Mac: Some font rendering issues and crashes with Web fonts

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

• Windows
  
• Mac
  
• Linux/FreeBSD

Source and full change log: Opera Desktop Team blog

[+Mephistopheles]

Ook!

Ook! I'm Dustin Wilson, and I'm a user experience designer for desktop here at Opera. You've probably seen my lurking around here before. I've been with the My Opera community since 2003, and I've been quite a vocal supporter of Opera. I just started working here on the 11th of January, and shortly thereafter I flew out to Oslo to meet and work with everyone. It's been extremely cold and dark, but great. I'm working with a great team, and we have a lot of awesome stuff planned. Fortunately for you all there are some nice design changes coming up! Stay tuned!

Why am I writing this post, then? They just needed a scapegoat person to write an intro to this Opera Next snapshot, and I was readily available and willing to do so. I'm perfectly sure this build contains many worthwhile changes! Have fun testing the build.

Known issues

• Mail header layout is broken
  
• Mac: Some font rendering issues, and crashes with Web fonts

Source and full change log: Opera Desktop Team blog
Download:

• Opera Next 12.00 build 1272 for Windows
  
• Opera Next 12.00 build 1272 for Mac OS X
  
• Opera Next 12.00 build 1272 for Linux/FreeBSD

[+Mephistopheles]

Address field adjustments

Recently I have been working on improvements in the address field. The main UI related complaint was that Opera didn't show the full address any more, even when there is room for it. That was true; in 11.6x versions the length was limited to around 1/3 of the address field length.

As a result, we have replaced the 3 column solution (icon, URL, title) with 2 columns. The first column contains the icon (no, not favicon yet), and the second column contains the text. This text includes the address, page title, and optional page excerpt (when the row contains information provided by history results). In cases where there is not enough space, we still cut the text.

We have also improved bolding rules, and provided new colors.

For bookmarks fans, we have further adjusted bookmark prioritization when ordering them in the drop down.


Please remember that work here is still ongoing, and further improvements are planned.

Known issues

• Further improvements to contrast and formatting are still being considered
  
• Favicons are not displayed and there is currently no option to bring them back
  
• Important parts of URLs can be cut off, if there is not enough space
  
• Mac: Some font rendering issues, and crashes with Web fonts

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

• Windows
  
• Mac
  
• Linux/FreeBSD

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

[Marshall]

Core update with Do Not Track, and mail and theme fixes


This is an Opera 12 (Wahoo) snapshot.

As you can see from the changelog, this build introduces quite a few fixes, changes and improvements. Since there's a lot of it, I'll highlight a few important things below.

Privacy

This Wahoo builds adds support for Do Not Track, which allows browser users to opt out of being tracked on the web. It is currently disabled by default, but can be enabled by enabling the following option in Opera's Preferences dialog: "Preferences > Advanced > Security > Ask websites not to track me"

Note that this will only work if the site actually honors the request. Few sites currently do, and the effect of DNT will have to be evaluated to see if it is a viable solution in the long run.

SSL performance

This build also introduces a first round of optimizations for faster SSL handling (CORE-41667):

TCP optimization to eliminate roundtrips
Improved session negotiation to save on waiting times
Improved connection handling which improves both HTTP and HTTPS connections
Quicker closing of connections allows for new connections at an earlier stage
Parallelizing OCSP/CRL uses half as much time to do revocation checking
Strict transport security improves security and will also improve speed when servers start using this feature

As an example, the first load at skandiabanken.no was reduced by one second or more. With 10 subsequent page loads, the time to open the page was almost cut in half in total.

XHR

With CORE-41784 (XMLHttpRequest Level 2 upload and progress events), we completed our support for progress events in XMLHttpRequest, for upload, download, and timeout update. This will improve the upload experience on Google services (no more Flash uploaders on YouTube and Gmail), and more sites are to follow.

More

There are numerous other improvements, including Core, mail and theme fixes. Take a look at the changelog for more information.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

• Windows
  
• Mac
  
• Linux/FreeBSD

Source

[+Mephistopheles]

Improving the stability of Wahoo (12.00)

It has been a little over a week since the last Wahoo (12.00) snapshot, so here is a shiny, new update.
As you might expect, internally work continues apace on Hardware Acceleration and other upcoming features. For this snapshot however the focus is improving stability and as such there are several key crash fixes.

In terms of feedback we primarily interested in any new regressions you notice since the previous Wahoo snapshot (12.00-1301), so please keep on topic and let us know if you find anything.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

• Windows
  
• Mac
  
• Linux/FreeBSD

Source: Opera Desktop Team blog

[Marshall]

Finally some hardware acceleration fixes

Our latest work package with hardware acceleration fixes has been in the pipeline for a long time for several reasons, but it has finally landed in mainline. Wahoo!

This work package is especially nice for Mac users, who will see major improvements to fonts now that we are using Apples Core Text api for everything except font management.

Let me also take this opportunity to thank you all for your great support and feedback over the years. After we started this blog early in 2006, communication with you, our users, improved dramatically. Alas, this week is my last week with Opera, it is time for me to move on. To quote my then colleague Wilhelm: So long, and thanks for all the bugs.

WARNING: This is a development snapshot: It contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes, and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all.

Download

• Windows
  
• Mac
  
• Linux/Free BSD

Source

[Athlonite]

the latest snapshot version 12.00.1417 gives you the choice of either OpenGL or DirectX for acceleration but it's not turned on by default

opera:config#Enable%20Hardware%20 Acceleration 1 for on 0 for off (software mode)

and

opera:config#Preferred%20rende rer set to 0 for OpenGL rendering or 1 for DirectX rendering mode

[raju.jauhar]

is there any webkit engine based build of opera is available for download

if yes kindly provide the link

[ncc50446]

There is only one out for Android. The one for Desktop most likely wont be out for a month. When it is, it will be posted here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/

Opera for Android: http://my.opera.com/...ade-for-android