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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."
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.
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
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.
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
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Part of the issue arises from the fact that much of browser rendering code is ancient. Much of the basic rendering pieces weren't built to handle some of the CSS properties. For instance, many advanced selectors break when you are dynamically adding content or changing/adding stylesheets.
Expect Internet Explorer to lag again unless they completely replace large parts of their HTML rendering engine for standard-compliant sites. There is simply too much legacy code running against the Internet Explorer control, unfortunately.
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.
Me?? I dont use CSS.. I'm a low-tech-guy
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
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!
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.
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