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Opera 9.5 To Fully Support CSS?
Albert Sandberg writes "According to a developer blog, it looks like Opera 9.5 (which has been code-named Kestrel) will be the first browser to fully support the CSS selector test (test is here). Finally! Weekly builds should start being available in a few weeks."
is it a problem of CSS spec if nobody can support it easily?
Really, the Opera web browser has allowed me to do great things throughout the internet, with hundreds of tabs open, and consequently more bookmarking being done, and session management, I do not know how productive I would be with Firefox alone. Commonly, when stranded on Firefox-only systems, I am burdened with odd tab loading impairments and generally limited to acting like I am doing literally one thing and one thing only-- no queuing up content or strands of thought, etc. Even with the hierarchical vertical tabbing enhancements through the TBE extension akin to iRider, my productivity seems to drop. So, I am glad to see more (good) publicity for Opera.
This post is fanboyism at its worst. Opera is going to fully support CSS selectors, not CSS. Selectors are just one structure in the CSS language. There are still many other parts of the CSS standard that are not supported by Opera and are not yet planned for any future release.
...Do I use a fully compliant browser in which half the pages out there won't display properly because they've been coded by lazy, clueless hacks with MCSE...or do I use the shit that is Internet Explorer because almost all pages will display semi-properly, even though the code - and IE - is totally fucked up?
I use Opera exclusively, and I know that one day everybody will create compliant webpages. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Sigh...
I use Opera, which is already known to support existing HTML standards pretty completely and accurately.
I still frequently run into web sites built by clueless authors who feel a need to do a browser check, and finding it's not IE or Firefox (or sometimes Netscape!), think it is their duty to inform me that their sites only work with "modern" or "updated" browsers. Feh. By and large, that immediately sends me to the site of a competitor if it's a commercial site I'm visiting.
When will web authors get a clue, and start coding to standards and not implementations. (fuck it if IE breaks because they don't do things correctly)? A properly written web site should never need to do a browser check.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Right. Opera has been completely free since 2005.
Um, yeah... maybe you didn't get the memo, but Opera's been free of charge and advertisements for like 2 years now.
Maybe not
It stands for Cascading Style Sheets.
(That link was the first hit on google for a search on CSS, incidentally...)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Despite Opera showing its superiority as a browser over and over again and on multiple platforms, from desktop to mobile to game systems, ther eis still no Slashdot Icon to mark Opera news stories.
OK, fine. It stands for Cascading Style Sheets. Welcome to the Internets.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Very nice news but somehow not surprising by the constant underdog. It truly is a shame that Opera only has 2% of the market considering how great it is in comparison to its competitors regarding speed, features, innovation and security. Imagine a browser so great that people actually paid for it as late as 2005 (these days, Opera is 100% free).
I'm using Konqueror 3.5.7 on Kubuntu right now, and it passes completely. I don't know how long it's been able to pass, since I just found out about the test now. Firefox 2.0.0.4 fails pretty badly, but this version of Konqueror says that it passes all the tests. Yet Opera claims that it is the first browser to pass? Objection! At least one browser has passed before it, and that Opera version is not even out yet, it's in the weekly builds. This is the stable version of Konqueror
This sig is only here so people stop skipping the last lines of my posts.
Since 1999 or so, the preferred way of putting style on web pages ("how this part of looks") is not mixed into the content structure ("what kind of information this part contains"), but in a separate place, the style sheet.
The style sheet Selectors say what parts of a page must carry it associated style, e.g. 2nd level headers (selector) must be blue and use a 14 point, bold, sans serif font (style).
The CSS stylesheet standard allows lots of complex kinds of selectors, and so browsers used to support only a small subset of selectors.
Got Pike?
Firefox 2.0.0.4 on Windows Vista:
From the 43 selectors 26 have passed, 10 are buggy and 7 are unsupported (Passed 357 out of 578 tests)
Internet Explorer 7.0.6000.16473 on Windows Vista:
From the 43 selectors 13 have passed, 4 are buggy and 26 are unsupported (Passed 289 out of 534 tests)
Lynx 2.8.3dev17 on Windows Vista:
No JavaScript == No tests. :(
Opera 8.5 on Nintendo DS:
From the 43 selectors 14 have passed, 3 are buggy and 26 are unsupported (Passed 313 out of 578 tests)
Opera 9.1 on Nintendo Wii:
From the 43 selectors 30 have passed, 2 are buggy and 11 are unsupported (Passed 450 out of 578 tests)
Opera 9.21 on Windows Vista:
From the 43 selectors 25 have passed, 3 are buggy and 15 are unsupported (Passed 346 out of 578 tests)
Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows Vista:
From the 43 selectors 25 have passed, 9 are buggy and 9 are unsupported (Passed 346 out of 578 tests)
Oddly enough, the Wii with an OLDER Opera wins in the Most Completely Working category, while Firefox wins in the Most They At Least Tried category (least unsupported).
The second big complaint was that it doesn't support more than 9 mouse buttons. I spent $100 on a fancy mouse, hoping I could control most of my GUI programs with only the mouse. Much to my surprise, any shortcuts after Button9 simply don't work. This was quite disappointing
I'm trying to figure out if that's a joke. Nine mouse buttons?
Any Mac user will tell you that one mouse button, when used in conjunction with seven funny-looking keyboard keys should be enough for anybody!
Konqueror 3.5.6 Results:
From the 43 selectors 43 have passed, 0 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 578 out of 578 tests)
This release of Konqueror has been their stable release since last January was supplanted by 3.5.7 last week. So Opera isn't the first. A stable released browser has been able to pass this test for at least 6 months. I don't know how 3.5.5 and before would have done on it.
All that said, Firefox tends to do better with the javascript heavy sites and has extensions I can't live without. If I were going to use something else it would probably be Konq though. When KDE4 comes out, Konq will be easily installed on Windows and OS X. That might get a bit more momentum behind it.
From the 43 selectors 10 have passed, 1 are buggy and 32 are unsupported (Passed 276 out of 578 tests)
.5%, So its cool that it will support it, but it doesn't do me any good.
IE6 still makes up for 40-45% of the users on the site I maintain for work. Opera is less than
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
Gecko tries to walk a razor-thin line of supporting standards (which are essentially defined in a vacuum) and working with the web as it actually exists.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
There is no browser out there that is 100% compliant with all the standards that describe web content.
One of the primary goals behind Firefox/Gecko is standards compliance and, as far as I know, Firefox is the most compliant browser out there, categorically speaking. The problem is that there are several standards (and several versions of each standard) and each standard is large enough that they have to be implemented piecemeal. Each browser team prioritizes what they think are the most important elements of each standard and implement them accordingly (presumably also implementing the easier elements as opportunity allows even if they're not important). Since each dev team has slightly different priorities (and each architecture has its own set of low hanging elements), a browser that is mostly compliant might not implement standard elements that a less compliant browser has.
If each dev team continues to work on standards compliance, eventually all browsers will be 100% compliant (that assumes that standards are not released faster than dev teams can catch up...sadly, this is not what history predicts). Realistically, some teams will never implement edge cases unless a big public relations fuss is made (like Acid 2 compliance).
So take heart that your beloved Firefox is doing better than most other browsers out there. However, make as much fuss about it as you can so that the dev teams stay focused.
*sigh* back to work...
Since the 99 of the great 1900's, ways of preferred stoning, and styling leafs of thy webbing, ("imparts of the face of thy brows") Is not structure forged with contentment? ("What manner of entrails subsume thy tiding parts?")
But in thou'ists separate standings, the sheeted of the stylets suffice.
Upon thy Selectors of the Sheet Stylets' dictate: ("What parts of this beast ought carry thy consorts!") E.G. Archfiend the 2nd, Level of the Headers, Lord of the Blue, and Bold user of the Fourteen-Pointed Seraphim") Indeed, it is but I, Sir Salvor of the Cataclysm. Eternal Barron of Travelers and appointed ruler of his Majesty's canonical archetypes.
GO FORTH IN GODS' GLORY VENERABLE SOLDIERS!
One of the primary goals behind Firefox/Gecko is standards compliance and, as far as I know, Firefox is the most compliant browser out there, categorically speaking.
Adverb: categorically `katu'górik(u)lee
In an unqualified manner
- flatly, unconditionally
I hardly think that's called for. As you can read in this discussion, Konqueror has supported this for six months, Opera will, Firefox won't for a while. And if you look at the summary table here, you'll see that while Firefox wins by 5% in HTML and CSS3, Opera wins by 3% in CSS2 and 5% in DOM. That's hardly an unconditional win for Firefox. Gecko is nothing unique, it's one of three very standards compliant engines together with KHTML (konq and safari) and Opera. Yes, it beats IE by far but IE belongs in the special olympics.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
umm excuse me, but i give a fuck about lynx. and I'm not a longbearded linux geek either.. I just happen to like browsing websites with a text-only browser once in a while. mainly when i am using a slow ass dial-up connection to connect to my linux server over ssh. in those cases, its faster to load the pages up in lynx than it is to wait for either opera or firefox to display them. when pages work decently in lynx, i can appreciate it.
Results from Konqueror 3.5.5:
From the 43 selectors 37 have passed, 6 are buggy and 0 are unsupported (Passed 570 out of 578 tests)
Often, this is because a certain art is required to figure out an effective set of keywords to get decent results (I frequently have to try three or four different keyword combinations and orders to get good results), but even for CSS, as per your example, it's not necessarily helpful for those "not in the know."
Your link, w3schools, is great for someone who already knows something about graphics design, or at least knows what it is. It wouldn't be helpful at all to, say, my gamer cousin who spends most of his time on BF2 and WoW, or my grandmother who only uses the Internet to stay in contact with family members across the country.
If you were to argue that w3schools isn't intended for them, then you're necessarily demonstrating my point that googling for something, e.g. "CSS", isn't necessarily going to help someone who doesn't already know what it is.
Your best link for that search, BTW, is the Wikipedia entry four links down, and that's only because Wikipedia is specifically written for laymen. If PageRank had put the Wikipedia entry two or three positions farther down, then there wouldn't have been any results for the layperson on the first page of results.
Typically, the best answer to the lay question, (e.g. "What's that?") isn't a Google search, it's a custom response by someone who knows about it. And if you're not willing to write that response, don't waste time--both yours and the questioner's--telling them to Google it. It's not your responsibility to make sure they don't ask that type of question; Your responses alone won't prevent that.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
You dissed Firefox on /. , major karma mistake (Score:0, Offtopic)
Yes, Opera is second to none overall, but don't let anyone know, OK? Yes, most of the good features of the new IE and Firefox actually came from Opera, but they don't know that, and as long as you keep getting modded into karma hell, they never will.
(Yes, I do use Firefox and Konqurer and Opera and I want them all, but please don't take my opera away... It is the ONE closed source tool I REALLY like, and since it does not threaten anyone please indulge us Opera users)
Passing a single test suite isn't exactly the same thing as supporting the whole standard perfectly. Test suites, by their very nature, only test select subsets of the standard. A single general test suite cannot expose every possible bug in every feature. On top of that, this test suite only covers the selectors, which is a fairly simple and straight-forward part of the spec. Heck, even Internet Explorer supports a bunch of CSS 3 selectors. It's one thing to claim full support for selectors; it's quite different to claim that pseudo-elements with table display values in nested floats with negative margins always work correctly. It's great to see progress, and Firefox and Opera are both impressively close to full support for the current CSS 2.1 specification, but let's not exaggerate the situation. They both still have a lot of work to do (as does Safari, which was clearly behind overall in version 2.x and is likely still a bit so in version 3).
...that no-one has mentioned some of the other gems from TFA, especially in relation to the *nix builds:
64bit Linux builds
Qt4 builds
Faster tab switching (my only gripe with the current Opera under Linux)
I've been using Opera since 2001, and on Linux since 2004, and it's great to see a vendor maintaining feature parity across different platforms.
The improvements to CSS et al are always welcome, but as some other users have pointed out it's almost always crappily coded sites that give "alternative" browsers a hard time, so it's also good to see they're apparently factoring in better support for error-ridden sites.
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