Opera 10.0 Alpha 1


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I hope they're still planning on implementing a better GUI in later builds. I remember an article about how Opera 10 was supposed to have a GUI update, I think...

This is an alpha... Usually GUI changes come in much later.

And to the people who said they didn't have issues upgrading: I really wonder what is messed up with my install, then. Bookmarks panel, personal bar, the theme, everything was pretty much all black bars. Even scrolling produced massive black artifacts. I deleted Opera, and removed the folders in the Users directory, and voila, all good. Luckily I back up my bookmarks in the form of migrating them to FF once in a while, lol.

EDIT: And 100% on the Acid3 test, here.

This is an alpha... Usually GUI changes come in much later.

And to the people who said they didn't have issues upgrading: I really wonder what is messed up with my install, then. Bookmarks panel, personal bar, the theme, everything was pretty much all black bars. Even scrolling produced massive black artifacts. I deleted Opera, and removed the folders in the Users directory, and voila, all good. Luckily I back up my bookmarks in the form of migrating them to FF once in a while, lol.

EDIT: And 100% on the Acid3 test, here.

i uninstalled 9.6 then installed 10 alpha and copied the profile to the 10's profile dir and its all working fine here (Y) even the theme i used on 9.6

also, 100% on acid3 here too which is what you should get. Seems like a rather decent alpha, not found anything that doesn't work yet :)

(Source)

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

Awesome, but what's the problem with UTF-32?

I think Opera removed it as part of the work in implementing HTML5. The W3C Working Draft for HTML5 says, "This specification does not make any attempt to support UTF-32 in its algorithms; support and use of UTF-32 can thus lead to unexpected behavior in implementations of this specification." If I had to guess, I would say that they might add UTF-32 back in at a later time when they have nearly finished implementing HTML5 and enough users ask for its inclusion.

How stable is it guys for an alpha version?

I have used it on two computers, both Windows XP SP3, for a few hours and I haven't experienced any crashes, bugs, or rendering errors (yet).

As a side-note: the Tango CL skin does not look right. The tabs are roughly 3 pixels too tall, causing a silver bar to run along the bottom of the set of tabs. This is the only visual glitch I've noticed. It's not that bad.

How stable is it guys for an alpha version?

No problems so far. They've finally fixed the frozen Facebook Notifications popup bug. It used to be entirely inaccessible in 9.62.

The installer artwork's hilarious. :laugh:

Web fonts seems like a cool idea. A good example is on the first page you see after upgrading, http://portal.opera.com/upgrade/

Inline spell check = FINALLY.

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