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Comment by iamelgringo | Hacker News Reader

What I love about Opera, is that they develop and release features that show up in other browsers like Firefox 6 months to a year later.

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Sorry, this is just wrong.

I am currently working on a drag-and-drop uploading tool, and would really like to use html5 to do it. The new interfaces involved are the drag and drop (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...) and File (http://www.w3.org/TR/file-upload/) APIs. Unfortunately, everyone except for Firefox have been slow in implementing the File interface, leaving me with a situation where the only shipping browser where standards-based code runs is Firefox 3.6 (fwiw, it works in Webkit nightly and Chrome 6 dev). In shipping webkit (safari 5, chrome 5), File is implemented (which gives meta data about a native file) but not FileReader (which gives the actual data) (btw if someone knows of a non-standard way to get the data from the File object in shipping webkit please let me know, i just want this to work. FF had a non-standard getAsBinary() method on the File object before FileReader was implemented, for example).

Opera doesn't even have File implemented.

Again, FF is the only shipping browser that native os-to-webapp uploading drags work in a standards compliant way. Give them some credit.

I'm not saying that FF or other browsers doesn't innovate. I'm just saying that I've seen tons of features that have started in Opera that end up implemented in other browsers.

Although that may be true, all of these features, with the exception of WebM, are in a RELEASED version of Firefox (3.6), and WebM is also already in the developer prerelease (nightly builds) of Firefox 4 (the next version).

Just had to http://xkcd.com/386/ this one.

I believe what he means is that opera has been the first to bring in a ton new features which were later copied by other browsers (or still even yet to) such as

tabbed browsing

mouse gestures

tab thumbnails

page zooming

opera turbo

bookmark sync

first to pass acid 3

opera unite

Spatial navigation

HTML5 datepicker (currently the only one)

and the list keeps going. These are just some of the major ones.

Opera is still the only browser that doesn't support any method of making a script load asynchronously. Firefox was the first browser to support the HTML5 async attribute for scripts.

And also, afaik, the only browser that doesn't allow copying in HTML. So if you want to copy information from Opera and paste it in, say, Evernote or Onenote, you lose all formatting. I know some people prefer it that way, but since Opera is highly configurable I don't understand why they don't even make it optional to copy the HTML.

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