Expect Opera 10 alpha next week

[wellofsouls]

http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2008/...ring-for-flight

The baby falcon is preparing for flight

By haavard. Saturday, 29. November 2008, 03:28:15

peregrine, Opera 10

Hi everyone!

While you may have seen me around in the blogs and forums, this is my first blog post on the desktop team blog. My former team mates and I have in fact been working on the desktop product all along as a separate team, but now we have merged with the rest of the desktop developers and QA to form a new and even stronger (and bigger!) desktop team.

We know that you have been waiting to get your hands on Opera 10 (Peregrine), and I am happy to announce that we are planning to release the first alpha of Opera 10 in the near future. The new version is the result of hard work that has been going on since even before 9.5 was released, and we are finally ready to let it spread its wings and fly out into the real world.

I'm not going to reveal too many details today, but I do want to talk a bit about what you can expect.

Opera 10 will feature the new Presto 2.2 engine (Opera 9.x runs on Presto 2.1.x), and one of the main purposes of the first alpha is to get some real-world testing, so that even more bugs can be fixed. A huge number of bugs have been fixed already since Presto 2.1, and there are a lot of new things in here, including improved performance and standards compliance. We hope, no, we know that you will help us find even more bugs and areas of improvement.

In addition to an updated engine with new features of its own, we have worked hard on adding a few user-related features that we have noticed are frequently requested by the community. I think a lot of people will be pleased with these additions.

Opera 10 is finally coming, and you can expect improved performance as well as features that we know that a lot of people in the community have requested.

Tune in next week for more details.

Can't wait... ;)

[Neo-Phi]

me too...but I hope they'll change the default skin, i hate it.

[Lee]

Nice, looking forward to it. :)

[HawkMan]

me too...but I hope they'll change the default skin, i hate it.

Yeah. An it's so nnoyingly hard to change the skin in opera too.

first you have to go to the builtin browser with previews, select a sekin you like and have it auto download and answer if you want to keep it... And then you don't even have to restart the browser....

[ViperAFK]

me too...but I hope they'll change the default skin, i hate it.

yeah same here, the skin looks pretty awful. And it would be really nice if they added native vista menus like firefox.

@hawkman most of the opera skins lookn like arse, trust me I know how to change the skin. Same goes for 99% of skinable applications. I'd rather have a good native skin ANY DAY. most app skins are awful looking.

[thealexweb]

I few things I hope to get out of Opera 10: -

1. Acid 3 100/100 (They claimed they had reached it ages ago but we haven't seen it be implemented yet.

2. Default Search to be Google and not Ask on the Speed Dial.

3. Easier Bookmarks importing and managment, it's horrid right now.

4. Silverlight support. (I know this is really Microsoft's area but Opera need to do their bit.)

5. A better interface, the current one is really ugly.

6. Better update system, like Firefox's. I don't want to have to download another exe file manually when I simply want to update my browser, I want it automated.

7. Better Speed Dial options (I mya want to update the website perhaps every day but the only default options are like 5 mins, 30 mins, etc.

8. Speed, it's quite slow for me, they claimed Opera 9.6 was fast but I never saw the speed they promised.

That's about it, I know I probably won't see most of this but I can always hope.

[Calum Veteran]

I quite like a lot of elements of Opera 9's default theme, especially the fact you can change the colour like you can. There are some things I hate, though, mainly the icons!

[Mike]

1. Acid 3 100/100 (They claimed they had reached it ages ago but we haven't seen it be implemented yet.

There was a build you could download that did 100/100 on the acid3 test, wasn't a full pass though i don't think

4. Silverlight support. (I know this is really Microsoft's area but Opera need to do their bit.)

silverlight 2 is supported, just MS don't say it is, i believe silverlight 1 is possible to get working in Opera too, i'd also say it is down to MS to get it working + supported as its their plugin

[Kronir]

I can't wait for the final Opera 10 to hit. I wonder how long it'll take... Ah well, in the meantime, IE8 will be out in a few months. :)

[HawkMan]

yeah same here, the skin looks pretty awful. And it would be really nice if they added native vista menus like firefox.

@hawkman most of the opera skins lookn like arse, trust me I know how to change the skin. Same goes for 99% of skinable applications. I'd rather have a good native skin ANY DAY. most app skins are awful looking.

I certainly hope you're not running FF.

and opera can use the windows native look as well

[ViperAFK]

I certainly hope you're not running FF.

and opera can use the windows native look as well

Opera's native theme looks terrible on vista. I KNOW ABOUT THE NATIVE THEME AND THEMES. Don't assume I'm retarded, I've even made a theme for opera back in the day. The menus look awful and aren't native in vista and the icons are pretty bad.

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

Opera's native theme looks terrible on vista. I KNOW ABOUT THE NATIVE THEME AND THEMES. Don't assume I'm retarded, I've even made a theme for opera back in the day. The menus look awful and aren't native in vista and the icons are pretty bad.

The 'native' skin looks even worse under OS X:

Horrible, just horrible. Whatever Opera 10 is going to look like, it cannot be worse than that.

[ViperAFK]

The 'native' skin looks even worse under OS X:

Horrible, just horrible. Whatever Opera 10 is going to look like, it cannot be worse than that.

That looks better than the windows version :laugh:

The linux one is bar far the worst of them all though, it's beyond ugly.

[HawkMan]

The 'native' skin looks even worse under OS X:

Horrible, just horrible. Whatever Opera 10 is going to look like, it cannot be worse than that.

Arrange it with the tabs at the bottom and outide of the buttons it looks pretty muh like safari.

and as far as I know, native ues the OS resources anyway so...

And why on earth would you want roboform over opera's built in password wand, roboform is horrible.

[+Audioboxer Subscriber²]

Looking forward to trying this, I just wish the browsers could take a page from Chrome's "native" look on Vista, and actually be pleasant to look at/use :laugh:

[+Frank B. Subscriber²]

Arrange it with the tabs at the bottom and outide of the buttons it looks pretty muh like safari.

and as far as I know, native ues the OS resources anyway so...

And why on earth would you want roboform over opera's built in password wand, roboform is horrible.

Safari looks like this:

Opera 9.62 doesn't even come close to it when it in the looks department.

Opera 10 should look better, seeing how Opera hired Jon Hicks - the guy who among other things designed the Firefox icon. To quote him:

Opera has been a browser vendor whose ideals and feature list I?ve applauded, but whose Mac interface design I?ve been, well, critical of to be honest. Now I?ve got a chance to ?put my money where my mouth is?. I?ll primarily be responsible for Opera desktop, Widgets and Mobile/Mini browsers, but general design too. I?ll hopefully get to implement the ideas I have for the logo and branding too. I can?t wait to get my teeth into it!

I'm curious to see the results of his work.

[-KJ]

Safari looks ugly, too. But Opera's native theme looks uglier.

[giga Veteran]

Arrange it with the tabs at the bottom and outide of the buttons it looks pretty muh like safari.

"Pretty much"? lol. It looks like how Firefox 2 was on mac. Also of note is that it's a Carbon app.

[i_was_here]

The linux one is bar far the worst of them all though, it's beyond ugly.

If only Opera for Linux used GTK :(

[wellofsouls]

If only Opera for Linux used GTK :(

luckily it doesn't use GTK ;)

[NienorGT]

I don't care about new features, I don't care about performance, what I care is about the interface :p

[dead.cell]

About time. Opera used to be known for it's amazing speed. Hell, that's what got me to try it a long while back. Now, it has neither speed or features and can easily fall behind Chrome (if it hasn't already) unless 10 can do something about it.

[Jub]

How is Opera not looking good?

Opera.tiff

[d_ralphie]

Now, it has neither speed or features

uh, so what you are saying is that opera has lost features and become slower than older versions of opera?!

[HawkMan]

Because as i can remember, u had to manually click the wand button, which is super annoying. There were other factors also that i forgot over time, but im sure if used the browser again i'd quickly be reminded.

Also Roboform works perfect for me, and i have zero problems. Already have tons of logins saved on it, so it'd be silly to switch to something that is dependent on the browser. So if i were using Opera and it ended up having a bug that deleted all my saved passwords and such... I'd have to redo it all. using a third party application for handling something such as this is much more reliant and secure in my opinion.

Yeah, you click the wand as opposed to clickign the submit buton, since the wand does this automatically.

The Wand as well as the pre configured data fields in Opera also works far better than Roboform has ever done. Opera sync also makes it portable along with your bookmarks and other settings

Also not having the fields auto fill by themseles but using the wand button to fill and submit, avoid a certain secuity flaw that FF suffererd because of that.