updates Meet the browser: Opera Next

[Crazysah]

Yay! Thanks for the latest build!

[Steve Gosselin]

Final release >

• Internationnal installer -> ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/923/int/
  
• Classic installer -> ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/win/923/en/
  
• Mac -> ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/mac/923/
  
• Linux -> ftp://ftp.opera.com/pub/opera/linux/923/final/en/
  

[halcyoncmdr]

Yeah, I can't download from those links... the 923 folder does not appear at all for me... :(

[Steve Gosselin]

The 9.23 builds that appeared on the FTP server today are being pulled due to an issue with Widgets.

//Source > Opera desktop team

I don't have any problem with this build installed on my PCs.

[halcyoncmdr]

Yet another 9.23 build

Hey

We were that close, but still so far away.. We have a new build with just a few fixes:

Changelog

• More Speed Dial stability fixes
  
• Fixed issue with some mouse wheels and scrolling up on Vista
  
• Fixed another fuzzer crash
  

Download:

Windows MSI

Windows Classic

Macintosh

Unix

//SOURCE: Desktop Team

[Steve Gosselin]

Opera 9.23 Build 8808 @ neowin.net /Softwares >

Opera is a free Web browser with a pop-up blocker, multiple-window navigation, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, an e-mail client with a spam filter, and integrated search for user security and speed. The cross-platform browser includes IRC-compatible chat, support for RSS newsfeeds, a password manager, and one-click customization and privacy-protection settings.

Features:

* New in version 9: Fraud protection, BitTorrent, Add your favorite search engines, Content blocker, Site preferences, Widgets, Improved rich text editing, Thumbnail preview

* Efficient surfing: Transfer manager, Tabbed browsing, Password manager, Integrated search, Pop-up blocking, Mouse gestures, Fast Forward, Sessions, Quick preferences, Notes, Voice, Keyboard Shortcuts, Trash can

* Security and privacy: Security bar, Encryption, Delete private data, Cookie control

* Mail and Chat: Opera mail, IRC chat

* Customization: Drag and drop, Skins, Language

* Accessibility: Zoom, Text size and colors, User style sheets,

* Web development: Standards support, Small-screen mode, Validate code, Toggle graphics and style sheets, Info panel, Reload from cache,

* Special: Full-screen mode, Kiosk mode aand more...

Changelogs > Changelog for Opera 9.23 for Windows | Changelog for Opera 9.23 for Mac | Changelog for Opera 9.23 for Linux

[Screeny]

First Kestrel Weekly available next Tuesday!

Happy birthday Jon

Our fearless, peerless leader Jon turned 40 today, and what he wants more than anything for this birthday is for us to provide our community with an alpha version of Kestrel. And to celebrate his birthday, we are happy to announce that we are planning to release the first build next Tuesday!

The first Kestrel build will include some cool new features and tons of bug fixes, but as it's an alpha it will still be buggy. We need your help improving the quality as fast as possible.

Oh and you will finally see what's hiding on the Status Bar. ;-)

Meanwhile we wish Jon the very best!

-The Desktop Team

//SOURCE: Desktop Team

Happy birthday, Jon!

[halcyoncmdr]

Yay, tuesday... :) Can't wait to see this.

[Veedems Veteran]

I'm waiting to see what Kestrel has to offer. The Firefox trunk has finally started to see some nice features added in, but I'm always open and welcome to some competition and, as far as innovation goes, the Opera team is the one that keeps pushing the envelope.

[Rappy Veteran]

I'm waiting to see what Kestrel has to offer. The Firefox trunk has finally started to see some nice features added in, but I'm always open and welcome to some competition and, as far as innovation goes, the Opera team is the one that keeps pushing the envelope.

Yeah I want to start reusing opera but if theres loads of new features then I think I could be using it again.

[Steve Gosselin]

Yay, tuesday... :) Can't wait to see this.

Woooohoooo :woot:

[halcyoncmdr]

Focus Areas during Kestrel Development

By Junyor. Friday, 31. August 2007, 18:27:28 kestrel

You may have read by now that the first public alpha of Kestrel is planned for next Tuesday, September 4th. Since there's still a couple days before then, we wanted to tell you a bit more about what to expect from Kestrel. Kestrel is the product of over a year of development, which began in our code repository on June 20, 2006. Since then, we've developed several major new features, fixed thousands of bugs, and made Opera the best it's ever been.

We've been dropping bits of information about Kestrel for several months now and it's time to reveal some more about this release. Users have suggested many new features and we're happy to be able to deliver some of them this time around. In Kestrel, we focused on five things: performance, site compatibility, accessibility, OS integration, and Opera Mail.

Performance

Opera's already fast, but we're not satisfied with fast. We want to do even better, which is why we've been focusing on a lot of performance problems over the past year. Two of the outcomes of this focus are our new ECMAscript engine and the new indexing and storage back-ends for Opera Mail. The new ECMAscript engine has been a pet project of our lead ECMAscript developer for several years and he's recently passed on his pride and joy to two other programming language junkies. The new ECMAscript engine uses fewer resources than anything we've done previously. Many parts are faster than the previous ECMAscript engine, but we still are working on further boosting the speed of the engine.

Opera Mail has seen similar improvements. The new indexing and storage back-ends use less memory, access the hard drive less often, and perform normal functions faster. Many users have complained about freezes when Opera Mail is checking for new mail or newsfeeds. These problems are largely gone. Mail checking and processing is faster and indexing and searching are more reliable.

Many other parts of Opera have seen speed boosts as well. The end result is faster, smoother surfing. That's something that everyone can enjoy.

Site Compatibility

With the release of Opera 8.5, we answered one of the biggest complaints from our users: Opera wasn't free. Since then, we've been focusing on the second biggest complaint: site compatibility. In the interest of stability, Opera hasn't seen many rendering engine fixes since Opera 9.0 was released over a year ago. That's about to change in a big way. We've fixed thousands of bugs in our rendering engine and we'll be delivering those fixes to you on Tuesday. There's still a lot more that we're planning to do and some messes to clean up, so expect to see continued progress on the rendering engine throughout the alpha and beta phases.

Some site compatibility issues can be solved by adding new functionality. That's why Kestrel includes support for things like the "overflow-x" and "overflow-y" CSS properties, JavaScript Getters and Setters, and line-/block-breaking in rich text editors. We've also fixed problems seen at Google's sites, in the default WordPress template, and in various JavaScript libraries. Opera is a web browser, after all, and Kestrel can handle more sites, better and faster than ever before.

Accessibility

Since support for screenreaders was removed in Opera 7, we've had our attention on other features. With Kestrel, we're bringing our focus back to accessibility. Kestrel includes experimental support for screenreaders such as Window-Eyes, Jaws, and VoiceOver on OS X. We're also working on support for ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications from the W3C). We're happy that once again users with visual disabilities can use Opera. Special thanks to Aaron Leventhal from IBM and GW Micro (makers of Window-Eyes) for their valuable feedback.

Our work on accessibility doesn't stop with screenreader support. We've improved spatial navigation and made keyboard shortcuts more accessible for new users. There will be some significant changes in existing keyboard shortcuts, but hopefully this will be the last major refactoring we do. Many users have run into problems inadvertently making changes via single-key shortcuts, so all single-key shortcuts (such as 1/2 to switch tabs, Z/X to navigate history, etc.) are disabled by default. They can easily be re-enabled in the Preferences.

OS Integration

Though Opera is a cross-platform browser, we try to make it feel at home on each platform. This work continues in Kestrel. Opera now works better on Vista, and integrates better with Default programs dialog on XP and Vista. On OS X, Opera looks and feels more like a native OS X application, with improved tabs, better default fonts, and pulsing buttons. We're releasing 64-bit builds for the first time, so Opera will work on 64-bit FreeBSD and Linux systems without work-arounds. Furthermore, Opera does a better job handling default applications on all platforms.

Opera Mail

Opera Mail is long overdue for an overhaul and you'll see the initial stages of that overhaul in Kestrel. As previously mentioned, we've rewritten the indexing and storage back-ends, but that's not all. Kestrel also includes a new IMAP back-end that solves problems when working with multiple clients, supports hierarchical mailbox display, and fixes various other problems. The Mail panel has been refreshed and we've improved draft message handling. Opera Mail is now more stable, faster, and less buggy. The initial release will have some rough edges, but we'll be smoothing things out as we approach the final release of Kestrel.

Much More

Some of the most exciting changes in Kestrel haven't been mentioned yet, so there's still plenty to look forward to next week. Join us in #weekly to discuss Kestrel, enjoy the weekend, and rest up because the race toward Kestrel final starts Tuesday!

//Source: Desktop Team

I just can't wait :)

[nXqd]

I love Opera much, but it shows Vietnamese damn bad !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I ask them many many times, and what I receive is nothing ( beside many useless answer ) . So we ( Vietnamese ) leave Opera, we still use Opera Blog a lot. But it's really weird, it's disappointed ..

I hope new version will fix ...

nXqd

[Steve Gosselin]

I ask them many many times, and what I receive is nothing ( beside many useless answer ) .

Hummm, try here > http://www.opera.com/support/bugs/

[Steve Gosselin]

More Kestrel details, new features revealed

Monday, 3. September 2007, 10:35:16

Oh well, I guess the cat's out of the bag

"Exclusive Opera 9.5 Features & Video"

//More Kestrel details, new features revealed

[Septimus]

Hmmm, OS Integration still needs work. Where is Protected Mode in Vista?

As soon as it gets that I'll definitely switch back...

[halcyoncmdr]

Lookin good, can't wait until tomorrow :)

[ring0]

9.5 is going to keep me warm on long, lonely nights. i can't wait.

[nXqd]

Still waiting for final version . I stick with Firefox now :)

nXqd

[Steve Gosselin]

Where is Protected Mode in Vista?

This mode is included in Firefox, SeaMonkey, Safari, K-Meleon,...? > No (Internet Explorer 7 under Windows Vista is the only application that uses protected mode).

[halcyoncmdr]

Doesn't Protected Mode just make the browser run in a sandboxed environment? Basically meaning that most browsers really don't need it since they are not targetted directly nearly as often as IE is to compromise the entire system...?

[Steve Gosselin]

"Doesn't Protected Mode just make the browser run in a sandboxed environment?"

- I believe that, yes.

"Basically meaning that most browsers really don't need it since they are not targetted directly nearly as often as IE is to compromise the entire system...?"

- Exactly, Internet Explorer = Windows Explorer = Windows...

[halcyoncmdr]

Ok, just wanted to make sure what I thought was at least semi-correct :) Woo Kestrel!!!

[Dogan]

Windows build 9594, Mac build 4487, UNIX build 1629.

Neat thumbnails, instant searching and more

By feldgendler. Friday, 12. October 2007, 15:39:15snapshot, alpha, kestrel

Здравствуйте, дорогие пользователи! Hello, dear users!

Here is another Friday build for you, with a lot of bug fixes and cool stuff added. Before reporting issues, please check the Known issues section at the bottom of this post! We get a lot of duplicate bug reports on the known issues every time we release a snapshot. Please save the QA team some time by not reporting them once again.

Layout width detection for thumbnails

Even in 2007, when it's common to have a 1600?1200 screen (or two of them), and when at the same time people browse the web using mobile devices with 320?240 screens, there are still a lot of web designers who assume that a “typical user” has a 800 or 1024 pixel wide screen. On the other hand, many websites stretch dynamically, making good use of all the available horizontal space.

When you hold the mouse over a tab, a page thumbnail appears. We used to generate these thumbnails by taking the 1024 leftmost pixels from what you see in the window, even if the window is wider. This worked acceptably for many popular newspaper sites, but broke Google's main page and other pages that fill up the entire window or have something centered. The wider your screen is, the easier it was to see that the thumbnail image was cut off on the right. It also broke those fixed-layout websites that had their concent centered rather than left-aligned. However, taking the entire window width instead of the 1024 pixels wasn't an option, too, because it would leave a lot of white space on the right of thumbnails for fixed-layout pages, making miniature pictures look even smaller and uglier.

In this build, we're including an experimental feature that tries to deal with fixed-width layouts without breaking flexible layouts. The new layout width detection code runs some heuristic checks on the page layout and tries to detect whether it has been made for fixed with. The algorithm measures the width occupied by all meaningful content (text, images, plugins, input fields, but not empty space with backgrounds) and compares it to typical screen width values such as 800 and 1024 with some degree of tolerance. It can detect both left-aligned or centered layouts.

When generating a thumbnail, we now first try to detect a fixed layout. If we have one, then only the part of the horizontal space actually occupied by meaningful content is used to make the thumbnail; otherwise, a miniature of the entire window is generated. This means that you should not see any more wasted space on the sides of thumbnails when you hover a tab, but the pages that fill the entire window should never be cut off. Because this is, in fact, guesswork, it's expected to fail and give incorrect results now and then, but not too often. Please experiment with all kinds of pages and all kinds of settings and report any cases when it breaks.

For now, we're only using the layout width detection for thumbnails, but we might as well start using it for something else in the future.

Other new stuffb>

New “logical searching” code — this means that inline find is now practically instant even on very long pages

The Feeds toolbar got a new button to check for updates

Added “Make Readable” action. Currently, it's not available through any menu, toolbar, or keyboard shortcut, but it's possible to bind it manually. How it works: select some text on the page that is hard to read because the font size is too small, then activate the action. The page will automatically zoom up so that the text becomes readable

Added support for pointer-events="boundingBox" in SVG

It is now possible to use an SVG image in an IMG element as well as specify one as a background image in CSS

Improved performance of JS Date.getX methods

Bugs fixedb>

Fixed an issue where pages could cause scripts to run in opera:historysearch. Thanks to David Bloom for reporting the issue

Fixed display of inline elements within justified text

Element borders are no longer offset from the area filled with background color

No more crashing on contenteditable in XML

Text-shadow with 1px blur radius now actually shows some blurring

Widgets whose files are in a subdirectory of the zip archive are supported again

The list of chat rooms now shows the correct number of users in each room

No more repaint artefacts with the dropdown menu on www.subsys.no

getAttribute will return the updated value after modifying the element's style properties

Two attributes with the same local name and namespace on the same XML element are now a fatal parsing error, as per XML spec

Opera no longer spends a lot of time on startup trying to read every file in the cache

Pending IMAP and POP commands are now preserved and optionally executed on the next startup

Getters and setters are now exposed for properties of native JS objects

Fixed fetching of POP mail after purging the trash

The outline doesn't follow the “silhouette” of children elements clipped using overflow:hidden anymore

Legend is not anymore pushed into the fieldset by a comment before it

Entities sent to plugins are now properly decoded, fixes slideshow on www.vg.no

setTimeout() is no longer confused when an object is passed instead of a numeric delay value

Mail passwords are no longer lost when clearing wand passwords

No more crashing when installing widgets

The client certificate selection dialog now shows the originating server name

Messages wouldn't have attachment icons and wouldn't show in the Attachment views; fixed now

Styling of opera:historysearch is now consistent with other internal Opera pages such as opera:about

Bodies of auto-saved drafts wouldn't display; fixed now

Downloads won't overwrite existing files without warning anymore

Fixed an issue with propagation of bottom margins that affected maps.google.com

Multiple optimizations in the internal search engine used for searching in visited pages and mail

Dozens of other fixes in the rendering engine

Fixed some more crashers and memory leaks…

Windows-specificb>

Fixed crasher when dragging a toolbar button from a webpage to the Start bar

Speed Dial sometimes showed thumbnails for wrong pages

Ellipses in menus were displaed incorrectly on Windows 98

Fixed a DDE communication issue

Interlaced PNG images with alpha transparency are now displayed correctly in Windows Vista

Nonsensical filter is no more shown in the file chooser for a form upload

Opera window is no more resizable in full screen mode

Left Alt+Shift doesn't switch the text direction anymore

UNIX-specificb>

Icons in the File menu are now properly sized in QT4 builds

Ensured that all Flash 9.0 r6* versions get the GTK main loop they need

When avoiding to overwrite an existing file, downloads are now renamed to a more scripting-friendly “filename_N.ext” instead of “filenam(N)N).ext”

The GTK file chooser is used under XFCE

Mac-specificb>

Command-Option-Left/Right added as shortcuts to switch tabs

Fixed repaint issues on OS X 10.3

KeyCodes for the arrow keys are now compatible with those on Windows

The last character or word in an element with text-shadow and opacity is no more lost

The click that activates an inactive Opera window is now also handled (e.g. it activates buttons)

U+21A9 LEFTWARDS ARROW WITH HOOK character is now rendered properly

It's now possible to play the Dolphin Olympics game again :-)

Removed the Brushed Metal skin

Previously known issues fixed in this buildb>

[bUG 264975] Fixed display of smileys in mail and chat

[bUG 285741] Opera doesn't freeze anymore when opening the feeds menu

[bUG 271585] The last directory used is now remembered in the Save As and Open dialogs

Known issuesb>

[bUG 290358] Bookmarks cannot be selected from the Bookmarks menu

[bUG 290355] Opera crashes when clicking bookmarks in Personal bar

If you used the Brushed Metal skin in the previous release, Opera for OS X will crash on startup

This build fails the Acid2 test

[bUG 284849] Yahoo! Mail beta, Flickr maps, Google reader may crash Opera

Won't run correctly on Windows 95 or 98

OS X version may cause persistent freezes on start-up

POP server cleaning has been disabled: When disabling the "Leave messages on server" option, existing messages on the server are not removed

[bUG 287170] On OS X, UI thumbnails have black backgrounds when using native skins

[bUG 184894] Native OS X UI elements cannot be used in skins

[bUG 280536] Opera on OS X will sometimes freeze when exiting Preferences

[bUG 286384] Yahoo mail is broken

[bUG 280261] Removing messages from filters does not work

[bUG 213115] Queued mail is sent at the next check, instead of waiting for manual actionDownloadb>

Windows

Macintosh

UNIX

[The Right Guy]

Thats a nice build! :D almost all bug are gone for me