Opera 9 beta
So, today we released the first Opera 9 beta. The Opera 9 beta marks a significant step forwards for Opera.
First, we’ve eaten some serious Web 2.0 kool-aid, and you’ll find features for needs even beyond Web 2.0
- Widgets: Do you eed a small application that you can deploy unaltered to Windows, Unix and Mac users? Widgets are a platform for delivering such targeted applications:
- The users downloads and installs them locally, either using the built-in widget-managment interface. or by clicking on links to widgets on web pages.
- Developers write these applications using bog-standard web technology: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SVG. Anything you would use on regular web pages, you can use in widgets.
- The widget security model allows widgets to communicate with multiple domains. What does this mean? You want a widget that provides you with a combined inbox for GMail, YahooMail and Hotmail? Can be done. A good example of a widget that takes advantage of this is KnowledgeMate — the widget that won the Opera Widget competition held in conjunction with The Gathering
- Standard improvements: Yes, of course, we now pass Acid 2 in a build suitable for the general public. Not only that: Vastly improved SVG support. Support for Web Forms 2.0. Support for XSLT and XPath (And, may I add, our XPath support seems, from the tests I’ve done to be blindingly fast).
- More standard improvements: The WhatWG has been doing wonderful work with HTML 5. We have implemented several parts of that specification:
- Cross-document messaging - a safe way of letting services from different domains interact with each other.
- Canvas support. We also have a couple of extensions
- Support for the Audio object, a native method for playing sound in the browser. Combine this with what we have on the canvas, and you have a nice starting point for writing online games. (Are you reading this, Andrew?)
In addition to this, we have made vast improvements to what once was the JavaScript console, as it now covers CSS errors in addition to a bunch of other error types.
Downloads and changelogs
First, read the changelog for your platform:
Then Download and enjoy!
Comments
Comment from Kyrre Baker on 2006-04-20 16:22
Congratulations to Opera. This build is great and it seems like this could be a FF - killer for me.
Comment from Sébastien Guillon on 2006-04-20 23:11
Come on Kyrre wouldn’t rather it be an IE killer?
As for me, I wish no harm to Firefox, although I think Opera is the superior browser.
Thanks Arve
Comment from Kyrre Baker on 2006-04-21 11:22
If you read the comment again there’s a “for me” at the end. Meaning that i “killed” MSIE some time ago and really can’t do it again ;-)
Besides, there’s no MSIE at my Linux setup, and this being my primary “machine” i can’t relate to MSIE anymore.
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