Simon Willison’s Weblog

Opera Unite. Opera’s big announcement: a developer preview (“labs release”) of their new web-server-in-your-browser feature, Unite. Includes an Opera-hosted proxy to help break through your firewall. The web server can be customised using server-side JavaScript running in an Opera Widget.

# 16th June 2009, 11 am / unite, operaunite, opera, javascript, webservers, widgets

Changes in Opera’s user agent string format (via) How depressing... Opera 10 will ship with 9.80 in the User-Agent string because badly written browser sniffing scripts can’t cope with double digits.

# 28th May 2009, 1:16 am / opera, browsersniffing, browsers, useragent

and now... Opera. Jon Hicks is joining Opera as Senior Designer. I absolutely cannot wait to see what he comes up with there.

# 9th October 2008, 6:39 pm / jon-hicks, opera, design, browsers

Opera Web Standards Curriculum. Opera commissioned an impressive sequence of articles from a bunch of very talented people to help address the monstrous learning curve for modern client-side development.

# 8th July 2008, 2:22 pm / opera, web-standards, webstandardscurriculum, teaching

A browser sniffing warning: The trouble with Acid3 and TinyMCE. Opera recommend “bug detection”, a step up from object detection and browser sniffing where your JavaScript includes mini unit test style fragments of code designed to test if buggy behaviour you are working around still affects the user’s browser.

# 4th July 2008, 8:24 am / bugdetection, javascript, object, browsers, opera, objectdetection, browsersniffing, acid3, tinymce

Google Gears renamed “Gears”. “We want to make it clear that Gears isn’t just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.” Support for Firefox 3 and Safari is being added and Opera are integrating Gears with both their desktop and mobile browsers.

# 29th May 2008, 12:38 am / gears, google, opera, firefox3, safari

Opera Dragonfly. Opera’s new Firebug-style developer console. Out in alpha and it shows (slow to load and the interactive console leaves a lot to be desired) but still looks incredibly promising, especially the remote debugging tools for working with Opera on phones and games consoles.

# 6th May 2008, 7:04 pm / opera, firebug, debugging, dragonfly

Firefox 3’s password remembering. I’m loving Firefox 3, and the way it does password remembering (with a non-modal toolbar so you can tell if your password worked before deciding to save it) is just one of the major improvements. Opera gets this right as well.

# 2nd April 2008, 8:24 pm / opera, passwordsaving, firefox3, mozilla, nelsonminar

Opera and the Acid3 Test. Screenshot shows 100/100 (live code or it didn’t happen!)—Opera’s codebase must be in extremely good shape to fix so many issues so quickly.

# 26th March 2008, 10:47 pm / opera, browsers, acid3, web-standards

Principles and Legality. Eric Meyer notes that language about legality in Microsoft’s recent IE announcement suggests that Opera’s much criticised EU threat may have helped positively influence the result.

# 4th March 2008, 7:45 pm / opera, eric-meyer, ie8, standards, microsoft, legal

Blob Sallad—canvas tag and JavaScript physics simulation experiment. Björn Lindberg provides a detailed code walkthrough of his brilliant canvas demo, inspired by Loco Rocco.

# 26th January 2008, 12:25 pm / locorocco, javascript, canvas, opera, bjornlindberg, tutorial, physics

Full Page Zoom Is For Sissies. Ryan points out that sizing everything in ems, while neat, imposes a pretty hefty maintenance cost and is rapidly becoming unnecessary thanks to the page zoom feature in IE 7, Opera and Firefox 3.0.

# 19th January 2008, 7:36 am / firefox3, fullpagezoom, ems, css, ryan-tomayko, ie7, opera

Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari.

# 9th December 2007, 12:36 pm / gareth-rushgrove, jash, javascript, ie, firefox, opera, safari, bookmarklet, shell

Taking the canvas to another dimension. Opera have finally released a test version with support for a opera-3d canvas context—Windows only for the moment, but Mac and Linux versions are promised “soon”.

# 16th November 2007, 1:39 pm / opera, 3d, canvas, javascript

Opera 9.5 alpha, Kestrel, released. “With history search, Opera creates a full-text index of each and every page you visit, and when you go to the address bar, you can simply start entering words you know have been on pages you’ve visited before, and items matching your search show up.” I just tried this; it’s magic. I’m switching back to Opera from Camino.

# 16th September 2007, 8:34 pm / opera, camino, browsers, history, search, kestrel, full-text-search

Opera 9.5 (Kestrel). The latest Opera alpha includes a bunch of CSS3 features (including an almost full implementation of CSS3 Selectors) as well as the ability to use SVG for scalable background images.

# 4th September 2007, 10:49 am / svg, opera, opera95, css3, selectors, annevankesteren, browsers, releases

The Wii Remote API. “allows the Web page to detect all Wii Remotes that are connected to the Wii [...] this makes it possible to make Web pages interact with up to four users at the same time, a concept not normally possible with traditional JavaScript event detection.”

# 6th August 2007, 9:32 pm / javascript, opera, wii

Dev.Opera article index. Should be of interest to all client-side web developers.

# 30th April 2007, 2:26 pm / web-development, opera

Timing and Synchronization in JavaScript. Comprehensive overview of how browsers (Opera in particular) load scripts and queue events, with suggestions for best practices.

# 30th April 2007, 2:24 pm / opera, javascript, timing, browsers

Web Technologies for Opera Web Applications. A one page summary of the various standards and extensions supported by Opera.

# 11th April 2007, 2 pm / opera

IE 7 does not resize text sized in pixels. I said it does the other day; I was wrong. Text sizing is still broken, but it does have a full page zoom feature (like Opera’s but not as smooth).

# 4th April 2007, 10:40 pm / opera, ie7, pixels

Improve your forms using HTML5! (via) Anne Van Kesteren demonstrates the Web Forms 2 support in Opera 9—new form attributes include autofocus, required and type=email.

# 13th March 2007, 2:08 pm / html5, opera, annevankesteren, webforms2

wii.js (via) A JavaScript library that lets you detect the Wii browser, and provides easy hooks for reacting to keys pressed on the Wiimote.

# 12th March 2007, 10:23 pm / wii, javascript, opera

Opera Skins: Tango CL. This skin is the first thing I install when I set up Opera. It’s an enormous improvement on the default.

# 26th January 2007, 4:16 pm / opera, skin

Browser JavaScript in Opera. Opera monkeypatches some sites, and auto-updates the patches once a week.

# 3rd August 2006, 5:37 pm / opera, javascript