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Opera 9 Released! [message #204792]

Wed, 21 June 2006 14:05

Aircraftkiller
Messages: 8213
Registered: February 2003

Karma: 1

General (5 Stars)

Holy fucking shit is all I can sum O9 up as.

Opera 9

Yeah. Opera 9 is out. Among the new features are BitTorrent, content blocker, customizable search engines, site-specific preferences and more. More importantly, there are numerous improvements for web authors. Read on
Widgets

The most prominent new feature of Opera 9 (and the one I’ve been most buried in) is widgets. And you should really learn to love them. To parrot something I said in issue #3 of Opera Bits

Widgets are small applications, created using standard web technologies. This means that authors can deploy the same application instantly all of the desktop platforms Opera resides on, and just expect the application to work. Furthermore, this is done using well-known web technologies. All of the world’s Web 2.0 companies can bring their application to the user’s desktop, having a presence beyond being “just a web service”. Their applications instantly available to the user.

Also, by using web technologies, the threshold of writing software is much lower. This means that you will get software authored by people who normally do not develop applications. Typically, this will be single-task applications, or what I would like to name microapplications. Some examples:
Mass validator - batch validates web pages
touchTheWire - lets you monitor web pages and check whether they’re up or not.
Torus - this is Tetris like you never played it before (and if you want something more like the traditional game of block stacking, there’s WidgetTetra ).
Opera clock - In real life, I always prefered analog clocks. This is a rather space-saving variety. The code, based on canvas, is so easy to use that our pixelmonkey creates new clockfaces when he has five minutes to spare.

I could have mentioned a bunch of other widgets, but it’s really much better if you just check it out yourself. If you’d rather just get started with widget creation, there is some introductory material:
Your first widget
Widgets and animation
Deploying widgets
Opera animation library
config.xml file syntax
Opera widget forum for those that want to start creating widgets.
Standards and technologies

The changelog has all the gory details, but I’ll highlight some of what I like most:
Atom 1.0 support.
OPML import and export
Multiple rendering fixes. We pass Acid 2
SVG 1.1 basic
Support for the canvas element
Support for Audio
Body element now uses margin instead of padding by default. This has been the cause of a lot of headaches for developers new to Opera.
Added support for XSLT 1.0 and the XSLTProcessor constructor.
XPath 1.0
DOM level 2 Style Sheets and associated parts of DOM level 2 CSS
Rich text editing: designMode and contentEditable
History navigation improvements
Web forms 2.0 - the new configuration editor, opera:config uses this actively.

Again, examine the changelogs
Linux
Windows
Mac
Other platforms

And download Opera 9 now — you’ll enjoy it!

I personally suggest using the Touch The Sky widget as your primary widget in the browser.

http://www.opera.com

http://widgets.opera.com

[Updated on: Wed, 21 June 2006 14:14]