Simon Willison’s Weblog

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30 items tagged “opera”

2013

What data structures are used to implement the DOM tree?

You may enjoy this post from Hixie back in 2002 which illustrates how different browsers deal with incorrectly nested HTML. IE6 used to create a tree that wasn’t actually a tree! http://ln.hixie.ch/?start=103791...

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2009

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

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

2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ian’s Acid 3, unlike its predecessors, is not about establishing a baseline of useful web capabilities. It’s quite explicitly about making browser developers jump—Ian specifically sought out tests that were broken in WebKit, Opera, and Gecko, perhaps out of a twisted attempt at fairness. But the Acid tests shouldn’t be fair to browsers, they should be fair to the web; they should be based on how good the web will be as a platform if all browsers conform, not about how far any given browser has to stretch to get there.

Mike Shaver # 27th March 2008, 1:35 pm

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

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

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

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

2007

Jash: JavaScript Shell (via) An advanced JavaScript interactive shell bookmarklet that works in IE, Firefox, Opera and Safari. # 9th December 2007, 12:36 pm

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 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 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

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

Dev.Opera article index. Should be of interest to all client-side web developers. # 30th April 2007, 2:26 pm

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

Web Technologies for Opera Web Applications. A one page summary of the various standards and extensions supported by Opera. # 11th April 2007, 2 pm

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

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

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

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

2006

Sticking with Opera 9

It’s been a month and a half since I started using Opera 9, with a promise to report back later. I’m still using it, although some of the things I liked initially have faded while others have emerged.

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Browser JavaScript in Opera. Opera monkeypatches some sites, and auto-updates the patches once a week. # 3rd August 2006, 5:37 pm

Two revolutionary features in Opera 9

Wow, if I’m not careful this is going to turn in to a promotional blog for Opera.

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Opera Mini 2.0

Just as I was getting thoroughly sick of the whole X-2.0 trend along comes a product I can really get excited about. Opera Mini 2.0 is a truly lovely piece of software. It’s a free web browser for your phone, accompanied by a free proxy:

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