Standards support in Opera 10 beta (just released) | Hacker News Reader

Standards support in Opera 10 beta (just released)

dev.opera.com

21 pointsendtime13 comments

Seems stabler than the alpha (for example, works with Facebook now) and has some new UI functionality, in addition to what's in the article.

Download here: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

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You really start to feel just how huge and bloated a lot of web pages have become when you get a mobile broadband dongle and are charged £15 per GB by Vodafone. One popular British forum site has some pages weighing in at upwards of 1MB each!

Opera 10 attempts to remedy this with its "Turbo" function - if you've used Opera Mini on a mobile phone, it's basically this for the desktop browser, going through a proxy to shrink images and strip out unnecessary stuff. It's worth having Opera installed on your laptop just for this - on average, it's been shrinking pages by around 3x for me. A brilliant and unique feature.

If you right-click the turbo icon in the bottom left corner there's a config menu where you can choose the Auto mode.

I'm on a fast connection, but I noticed that sometimes it still compresses pages. Not sure how effective it is, but worth trying.

I've been using the Opera 10 alpha as my primary browser, and I love it. The addition of in line spell check allowed me to leave Firefox behind 6 months ago.

I pretty much only use it for the Firebug plugin, but the Opera's clone of Firebug, Dragonfly is looking better all the time. To check it out click Tools>Advanced>Developer tools.

Dragonfly seems to have been improved quite a bit since the Alpha. Now you can click on the elements in the web page and have them selected in the source. Nice.

The only thing I miss in Opera now is Firefox's tags feature for the bookmarks . . .

Not sure why my text summary isn't showing up, but anyway, here's a download link: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/. I figured linking to the article about the standards support would be more appropriate for HN.

Small browsers implementing cool features always makes it painfully obvious how poor and inextensible HTML and CSS really are. There's no way you can use CSS3 for the next 4-8 years.

I (and my coworkers) have lately taken to coding for Safari/FF/Opera as long as IE will degrade in some way that's not horrible. For example, we used to have this rounded corner div helper that did all kinds of crazy shit to get rounded corners in IE. Now though, we just set moz-border-radius, webkit-border-radius and border-radius. IE users see a box with sharp corners, and if Microsoft ever implements border-radius they'll see it rounded, but until then it's not really a big deal. I could see doing the same thing with fonts or other such "nice" additions to CSS.

Is there any downside though to using something like the @font-face css3 tag?

It seems to fallback quite nicely to whatever secondary, standard font you setup so I don't see why not use it to give the people using more up-to-date browsers a benefit.

Why wait, you can use parts of it today. Sure, IE may not get it, but it is called progressive enhancement for a reason.

I can't imagine how long it's going to take to get HTML 5 supported in a decent percentage of installed browsers?

Google is pushing big for HTML5 and it seems to be in the works for Firefox 3.5, Safari, not sure about IE.

Firefox 3.5, Safari 4 and Opera 10 are all up to date with some HTML5 stuff and CSS3.

They all auto-update their users so half of the world will be up to date by the end of the year.

Guess who is lagging behind...

I like the visual tabs. They were introduced by the discontinued Shiira browser and I am happy to have them back. I actually had a todo on my list to file a request, now I am happy. Thanks!

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