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Opera 10 Alpha 1 Released, Aces Acid 3 Test
Khuffie writes "It seems that the upcoming version of Opera 10, of which the first Alpha has recently been released, has already passed the Acid 3 test with a 100/100. The only other rendering engine to have a complete score is WebKit, which can be seen in Google Chrome's nightly build. Opera 10 Alpha 1 will also finally include auto-updates, inline spell checking, and see some improvements to its built-in mail client, including much-requested rich text composition."
Opera was last spotted moving across the country in a technicolored school bus called the "Further."
Perhaps the submitter could have benefitted from those.....
The acid test is important but what about important things for users..
Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?
...is it smooth? I thought that was part of the criteria for passing the test, not just the 100/100 thing.
Still, congratulations to the Opera team. Now for Acid4, whenever that comes out.
From a user's perspective: Yes, it's cool to pass the Acid tests, but unless one of my favourite websites breaks in Firefox (or IE, for the less geeky among us), I really won't care.
From a developer's perspective: Until the really atrocious browsers (*cough*IE*cough*) get up to standard, developers will continue to have headaches coding for cross-browser compatibility anyway. Currently, you have to test for "IE" and "everything else" (ok, so you need to test in all the non-IE browsers for completeness' sake, but if it works in one of them it's very likely going to work in all of them).
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Scoring 100/100 on the JavaScript subtests is only part of passing Acid3. A browser also has to render the page correctly (including the proper favicon) and complete each subtest within a certain amount of time. From reports in the Opera forums, it looks like Opera 10 still isn't passing the performance aspect of Acid3. I think Safari 4 is still the only browser to fully pass Acid3.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I've been using it all day (Ubuntu 8.10, gcc4/qt4) and I've not encountered any major setbacks or bad renderings. There's some graphical distortions on the tab bar, but I have a feeling that's a purely cosmetic, chrome issue which could be resolved with a quick flick of the wrist.
Really, I think Opera is slowly becoming my browser of choice for day-to-day activities. It's just faster than Firefox or Safari or Chrome. I'd like to see it get the process separation abilities of Chrome and the extensibility of Firefox, and it would be awesome. I still use Firefox for development, though, because its market share is much, much higher and the tools are there (Firebug and Web Developer, plus Venkman, etc.).
However, the mail client and feed reader are still lackluster. Thunderbird does a better job of the former, Google Reader handles the latter better. If Opera could act as a frontend to Google Reader, I'd be a very, very happy man, and so would thousands of others who like desktop applications with web-based backends.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Other features include a spell checker and auto updating.
Firefox had this years ago, seriously is this accurate, Opera just got these?
So Opera is a little behind the times...
Personally I can't wait until they get around to implementing horrendous security holes as a subset of its features!
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Okay I gave the OS X alpha a spin. It does get 100 on the Acid3, but still doesn't manage smooth animation on my machine and probably not on the reference hardware. Javascript performance is behind compared to the latest Webkit and the Sunspider test. On my machine the Opera alpha is very slightly slower than the release version of Safari and about six times slower than the nightly Webkit with the new javascript improvements. The alpha does support some OS X system services, but still fails to use the default spelling and grammar checking, instead offering only a proprietary spellcheck that ignores my carefully trained dictionaries that work in most all of my other programs.
It's nice to see Opera is still in the game and trying, but it feels like they're still falling behind in the new, turbocharged browser race. Now if only IE would fix their flat tires and get back in the race.
I hope that's something you have to explicitly enable, because I won't be upgrading if I'm forced into some horrible rich-text editor. I hate those. Colored text in different sizes, vertical bars instead of proper > quote indicators, and animated smileys, I crave these like I crave my penis falling off from leprosy.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I love Opera more than any other browser out there and use it all the time, but wake me up when it starts to support nested tabs. There was a post by a Firefox user not so long ago who mentioned such an addon. People are rightfully raving about this time saving feature (and similar addons).
Tabs are grouped hierarchially according to where they are opened from in the form of a tree, but they can be expanded if need be. Tab names can be fully seen (instead of just graphical icons), and a whole branch may be closed (e.g. a site + its sub pages). A massive space saver when you are working with loads of sites.
I posted a message on the Opera forum. One can but hope:
http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=257296
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Just tried it out, and of course it passes ACID3 as advertised. I still can't recommend this browser on the grounds that it can't correctly render absolutely positioned CSS elements, as demonstrated by the following code:
<!DOCTYPE html
PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Resize your browser with the vertical handle!</title>
</head>
<body>
<div style="position:absolute;left:20px;right:20px;top:20px;bottom:20px;background-color:lime;">
<div style="position:absolute;left:20px;right:20px;top:20px;bottom:20px;background-color:red;">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
Hosted version of the above:
http://echo.nextapp.com/content/test/operacss/
Opera 9.50, 9.60, and now 10.0alpha will not render the above properly if the browser is resized vertically. (9.27 and prior work perfectly) On the initial render, 9.5/9.6 and 10 do fine, but the moment one resizes the browser vertically (and NOT horizontally as well), things go awry. I reported this to their bug tracker six months ago, and posted a thread on their forums 2.5 months ago: http://my.opera.com/community/forums/topic.dml?id=250572 Have also mentioned it in their 9.6-about-to-be-released-post-non-working-sites thread.
This bug has additional consequences for AJAX applications that make use of on-screen measuring using offsetWidth/offsetHeight information. In such cases, even the initial rendering can be seriously flawed as offsetHeight returns incorrect values. (Note: offsetXXX properties are not part of a proper W3c standard, but are universally supported).
Apologize for the quasi-rant, but I just don't want to see another bug report about how our applications don't look right in a supposedly ACID3 compliant browser, thus indicating that the problem "MUST" be our fault. Please realize that passing ACID3, while a neat accomplishment and generally good thing, is far from a guarantee of standards compliance.
No big improvement in their Javascript engine either.
It has much better performance in a Sunspider test than Opera 9.6x.
But nowadays they seem to fall behing other browsers
It's not feature complete, the website hint at more coming especially sometime during january 2009. Also, this summary and many comments here are missing out on major feature additions like SVG font and web font support, and the CSS improvements. Too much focus, as usual IMHO, is given on Acid3 scores.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!