Archívum - nov 2008

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Hi everyone!

While you may have seen me around in the blogs and forums, this is my first blog post on the desktop team blog. My former team mates and I have in fact been working on the desktop product all along as a separate team, but now we have merged with the rest of the desktop developers and QA to form a new and even stronger (and bigger!) desktop team.

We know that you have been waiting to get your hands on Opera 10 (Peregrine), and I am happy to announce that we are planning to release the first alpha of Opera 10 in the near future. The new version is the result of hard work that has been going on since even before 9.5 was released, and we are finally ready to let it spread its wings and fly out into the real world.

I'm not going to reveal too many details today, but I do want to talk a bit about what you can expect.

Opera 10 will feature the new Presto 2.2 engine (Opera 9.x runs on Presto 2.1.x), and one of the main purposes of the first alpha is to get some real-world testing, so that even more bugs can be fixed. A huge number of bugs have been fixed already since Presto 2.1, and there are a lot of new things in here, including improved performance and standards compliance. We hope, no, we know that you will help us find even more bugs and areas of improvement.

In addition to an updated engine with new features of its own, we have worked hard on adding a few user-related features that we have noticed are frequently requested by the community. I think a lot of people will be pleased with these additions.

Opera 10 is finally coming, and you can expect improved performance as well as features that we know that a lot of people in the community have requested.

Tune in next week for more details.

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This week the little big Opera Mini steals the spotlight. An interesting read with global coverage is out on Reuters — read the article.

This story addresses a study that claims American youth trail in Internet use. It uses Opera's Mobile Browsing report to contradict the statement that "mobile phones are used for Internet access by a very small percentage of users, with the exception of the United Kingdom." The mobile browsing report has again become a source of information for those seeking real browsing data.

Weekend fun:

Opera Offers Its Mini Browser To The Android Phone

Android Can Now Go To The Opera

Opera 4.2 Browser Blooms in Android's Unwalled Garden (interesting picture they use in the article :p)

Opera Mini browser available for Google Android

Opera Mini 4.2 Now Official

American Youth Trail in Internet Use

American youth trail in Internet use: Survey

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We have a little Friday surprise for you, in the form of an update to Opera Dragonfly. Right after publishing Alpha 3, we pushed an update to the cutting-edge path that we are now pushing to the default path.

The update only contains two changes of note, so we will not provide a full changelog this time:

We've added support for the commands clear() and dir(

to the command line. The clear() command clears the command line output, and dir() allows you to inspect an object. For instance, dir( window ) inspects the window.object

The second change is the main reason for pushing this update, and it should vastly improve the Opera Dragonfly experience. By encoding all image resources as data:-URIs, loading of Opera Dragonfly should be much faster. This is especially noticeable for first-time users, and for users on slow networks.

If you are wondering how much faster, let us present a purely anecdotal indication: This release announcement is written on a bus trip to rural Norway. The bus company is kind enough to offer an affordable wifi connection. The connection is fairly slow, and has high latency. Yet, first loading of the new Opera Dragonfly in a clean Opera profile is faster on this bus, than loading the old version from within Opera's own network.

We hope you will enjoy this little Friday update of Opera Dragonfly, and the much-improved loading experience. Please let us know what you think of this minor update.

Opera Mini 4.2 beta now available for download in Android Market.

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In April we told you we were working on an Opera Mini version for Android. At that time you could download a technical preview and try for yourself. Now, as the device has hit the stores, we have been able to improve it even more.

As this is a beta, we know there are issues, and we can't promise that the final version will be just like this. But, we would very much like your feedback on this Android project. If you find any bugs, please report them, either through the phone, or by going to the bug report wizard.

We hope you will enjoy this beta release, and that you, like us, look forward to the final release!

Regards,
Bartek