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.
[peregrine Opera 10 ]
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Opera Mini 4.2 beta now available for download in Android Market.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

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We are proud to announce the release of Opera Mini 4.2. You can download it from http://mini.opera.comFirst of all, we would like to thank all of you who participated in the beta testing. Great job!

Here's a list of changes since the beta:

• Small font now contains Cyrillic
  
• Some language fixes
  
• Bugfixes based on your feedback
  

We hope you all enjoy this release as much as us, and that you will provide feedback in our forum. Bugs can be reported directly from Opera Mini (Menu -> Tools-> Help -> Bug report) or via our bug wizard.

Best regards,
The Opera Mini team

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Today, Opera Software released the final version of its much-anticipated Opera Mini 4.2 for mobile phones. Since the launch of the beta version of Opera Mini 4.2, speed trials have shown that this version gives more than 30% speed improvements for users in the US, due to the addition of a new Opera Mini server park in the United States.

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For those of you not on the www-style mailing list, you may not be aware that Dean Jackson announced today that Apple have published updated proposals for Transitions, Animations and Transforms. This news comes after the recent decision by the CSSWG at their October F2F meeting that it is very likely that the CSSWG will accept to work on them [Apple's proposals].

Full details of what’s been changed in these updated proposals can be found in Deans email, however, the most significant changes are splitting 2D and 3D transforms into separate documents and adding a list of properties that can be animated (and how to interpolate different property types)

It’s worth noting that these documents are only proposals, are likely to change, and haven’t formally been accepted by the W3C.

[Proposals ]
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Today, Opera Software unveiled its newly nipped and tucked social- networking site My Opera. With a focus on performance, design and usability, the revamped My Opera promises to be a smoother and more functional online haven for fun, friends and creative content.

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Opera mobile news

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Mobile Web access continues its march towards surpassing desktop Web access. Across the world, more people are using their phone to go online. This trend is clear as unique users, page views and data transfers for consumer Opera Mini users have continued to rise. Yet we also see this evolving in Southeast Asia, our spotlighted region this month.

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The announcement of IE8 Beta 2 started an important and public phase of the product development cycle getting broad public feedback. The team is providing detailed information and answering questions about the product in many different places. Now’s a good time to talk about what comes next.

Since the release of Beta 2, the team has been absorbed in the data we get from real people about the product. We have combed through instrumentation of over 20 million IE sessions and hundreds of hours of usability lab sessions. Together with IE MVPs, we have scrutinized thousands of threads from user forums and examined the issues that people are raising (not to mention all the times users opt to “Report a Webpage Problem…”). We have also spent hundreds of hours listening and answering questions in meetings with partners and other important organizations. We simply could not deliver IE8 the way our customers and developers want us to without all this information. We also received a lot of feedback about how we transitioned from the IE7 beta releases to the IE7 final release, and as a result, we want to be clear about the plan for IE8.

We will release one more public update of IE8 in the first quarter of 2009, and then follow that up with the final release. Our next public release of IE (typically called a “release candidate”) indicates the end of the beta period. We want the technical community of people and organizations interested in web browsers to take this update as a strong signal that IE8 is effectively complete and done. They should expect the final product to behave as this update does. We want them to test their sites and services with IE8, make any changes they feel are necessary for the best possible customer experience using IE8, and report any critical issues (e.g., issues impacting robustness, security, backwards compatibility, or completeness with respect to planned standards work). Our plan is to deliver the final product after listening for feedback about critical issues.

We will be very selective about what changes we make between the next update and final release. We will act on the most critical issues. We will be super clear about product changes we make between the update and the final release.

The call to action now for the technical community is to download beta 2 (if you haven’t already) and let us know about your experience. Next, please prepare for final testing with public update so you can let us know – quickly, loudly, and clearly – if you find absolutely critical issues with it before the release of the final product.

Thanks –

Dean Hachamovitch
General Manager, Internet Explorer

P.S. If you’re a developer, or service provider, or IT professional, how do you prepare for the final release of new software? Leave a comment – we’d like to know.

[IE Announcements ]
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We’ve just released Camino 1.6.5, a maintenance release which contains various security and stability updates to Camino 1.6.x. All users are urged to update.

In addition, Camino 1.6.5 is available in the following languages:

• Catalan
• Czech
• Dutch
• English (US)
• French
• German
• Italian
• Japanese
• Norwegian (Bokmål)
• Polish
• Portuguese (Brazillian)
• Russian
• Spanish (Castellano)
• Swedish

Download Camino 1.6.5 in English or its multilingual version now.

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Opera mobile news

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Marking the company's first operator-branded delivery to Africa, Opera Software announces its new agreement with Namibia's Cell One.

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There’s been an apparent need (voiced by the web community) for CSS-based Constants ever since the conception of CSS (even though there are many established server-side preprocessors in existance). From reading blogs and the like, people are either very much in favour or very much against the idea, but the feature’s mixed reception hasn’t stopped members of the CSSWG exploring and discussing the idea further, to the point where we now have two fairly detailed proposals from members of the Working Group. The aim of this post is to explore and then summarise the current state of both proposals (from an authors not a vendors point of view), comparing features of both.

Back in March this year, Dave Hyatt and Daniel Glazman combined forces and presented the first formal proposal for Variables to the Working Group, and (based on this spec) Hyatt subsequently implemented the module into Webkit nightlies; the implementation was distributed for around 5 months, but was later removed due to concerns regarding feature adoption by authors before the spec had any time to mature. In August this year, fantasai submitted a counter-proposal which detailed plans for a parse-time syntax for Constants (which are lost after the variables are parsed and therefore not mutable), compared to Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal which allowed for scriptable Variables.

Types of Constants

Fantasai’s proposal features three types of named Constants, ‘values’, ’style-sets’ and ’selectors’; a value constant represents a property value, a style-set constant represents one or more property declarations and a selector constant represents a selector. Each are declared using an @define rule and as fantasai explains, the syntax of an @define rule is the @define at-keyword, followed by either the values keyword (for declaring value constants) or the style-sets keyword (for declaring style-set constants) or the selectors keyword (for declaring selector constants), followed by a block. Examples (ripped straight from her proposal :)) showing the syntax for each of the three Constants are below:-

Values

@define values { textColor: black; bgColor: white; accentColor: silver; accentBorder: double silver 5px; }

Style-sets

define style-sets { noteBox { border-style: solid; padding: 1em; border-radius: 1em; } quoteBox { margin: 1em; } }

A feature of fantasai’s proposal is that constants are re-usable, so you can include ’style-set templates’ which can be applied to multiple selector declarations, using different value constant values.

Selectors

Note that any selectors used in such a variable aren’t allowed to be grouped (using the comma-seperated grouping syntax), since we will have the ability to group selector variables anyway. Selector constants would be useful for repeatedly selecting child/grandchild etc elements deep within a complex DOM tree; consider this:-

@define selectors { deeplynestedelement: body.home > div#main.container ~ ul#navigation > li a[href="http"] span#child > span#imrunningoutofnames;}
deeplynestedelement u, deeplynested b{ color:red; }

And with the addition of a possible :match() pseudo class in Selectors Level 4, you could do something like this to make the above statement even more organised:-

deeplynestedelement:matches(u,b){ color:red; }

Instead Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal simply utilises a new @variables rule in which any type of variable (presumably) can be used, without the need for type keywords - their proposal isn’t actually clear on whether different types of variables can be parsed (or whether this proposal simply targets value constants), however, after looking at several test cases, the implementation seems like it was capable of at least parsing ’style-sets’ constants too.

@variables { CorporateLogoBGColor: #fe8d12; }

div.logoContainer { background-color: var(CorporateLogoBGColor); }

Scoping

Two fairly major differences between the two proposals are their scoping behaviour. In fantasai’s proposal, by default, the scope of a named constant does not ordinarily cross @import boundaries; this essentially means that the use of variables declared in one @import are restricted to that particular stylesheet, unlike Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal where, by default, constants cross @import boundaries. However, using fantasai’s proposal, authors do have complete control over the scope by using one of three new keywords (which is placed between the @import keyword and the stylesheet URI), push, pull and sync; pull allows constants declared within the imported stylesheet to be used in the importing stylesheet; push allows constants declared above the @import rule in the importing style sheet to be used the imported style sheet; sync allows both of the previous, simultaneously.

The two proposals differ also in the way that constants relate to, and work with Media Types. In Hyatt’s/Glazman’s proposal, an optional Media Type keyword can be placed between the @variables keyword and succeeding block declaration. In fantasais proposal, constant declarations (placed within a @define block) can be nested within an @media block. However she metions, …if declared inside an @media rule, the scope of the declaration does not end with the @media block, meaning that constants can be used outside of the @media they’re placed in. It’s worth mentioning that the @media rule model/syntax differences could be trivially modified to use the other’s media type syntax.

[CSS3.info ]
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From the October F2F CSS Working Group minutes (Apple’s proposal); Apple presented their proposals for Animations and Transitions, made remarks on Transforms, gradients, reflections. All four major browser vendors are interested in these proposals, and it is very likely that the CSSWG will accept to work on them. Exciting stuff!

Hakon presented a proposal for a border-parts property, which defines an on/off mask over the border as a series of lengths; you can check out his proposal in more detail on www-style. Note, this is still very much an unapproved proposal and the WG have stated that they are still unsure how usable/useful a solution such as this would be.

Dave Hyatt and Daniel Glazman initially came up with a proposal for CSS Variables, and fantasai has now created a counter-proposal detailing plans for a purely parse-time, non-scriptable solution. To help distinguish between the merits of both, I’ve come up with a brief article comparing and summarising both proposals.

[CSS3.info ]
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Hey Flockstars,

I just had to share this video with you.  Flock's CEO Shawn Hardin stopped by the TechNow show (as seen on several California NBC stations) to talk about Flock 2.0, and I think it turned out great!

What I love about this video is how they deconstruct the browser piece by piece.  Flock can be intimidating at first (something we're constantly working on improving), but the way they split up the features is a fantastic way to introduce them.

Also, I think that's probably the coolest that Shawn's name has ever looked.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="tnflvplayer-embed" viewastext="" align="middle" width="100%" height="100%">
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"> <param name="FlashVars" value="flvPath=http://www.technowtv.com/ufiles/flv/TN_FlockFLV.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;autoBuffer=true"> <embed src="http://www.technowtv.com/tnflvplayer-embed.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="tnflvplayer-embed" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="flvPath=http://technow.magiclamp.net/ufiles/flv/TN_FlockFLV.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;autoBuffer=true" align="middle" width="461" height="488">
</object>

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

<!---->

Tags: Flock, NBC, TV, browser, TechNow, Shawn Hardin, video

<!---->

[News ]
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Hey Flockstars,

I just had to share this video with you.  Flock's CEO Shawn Hardin stopped by the TechNow show (as seen on several California NBC stations) to talk about Flock 2.0, and I think it turned out great!

What I love about this video is how they deconstruct the browser piece by piece.  Flock can be intimidating at first (something we're constantly working on improving), but the way they split up the features is a fantastic way to introduce them.

Also, I think that's probably the coolest that Shawn's name has ever looked.

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" id="tnflvplayer-embed" viewastext="" align="middle" width="100%" height="100%">
<param name="bgcolor" value="#ffffff"> <param name="FlashVars" value="flvPath=http://www.technowtv.com/ufiles/flv/TN_FlockFLV.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;autoBuffer=true"> <embed src="http://www.technowtv.com/tnflvplayer-embed.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#ffffff" name="tnflvplayer-embed" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" allowfullscreen="false" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" flashvars="flvPath=http://technow.magiclamp.net/ufiles/flv/TN_FlockFLV.flv&amp;autoPlay=false&amp;autoBuffer=true" align="middle" width="461" height="488">
</object>

Evan Hamilton
Community Ambassador
evan at flock dot com

Blogged with the Flock Browser

<!---->

Tags: Flock, NBC, TV, browser, TechNow, Shawn Hardin, video

<!---->

[News ]
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Hi folks, I've now started as Lead Designer at Opera, and this is my inaugural post on the Desktop Team Blog! I'm looking forward to blogging here about the process as much as I can.

I'm currently working on a strategy on how to take the Opera User Interface forward, and I'm eager to get your opinions on a particular subject: Native look and feel.

How much does Opera feel like native application on your operating system? How much does it matter to you? Those using Opera on just one platform may want it look utterly native, whereas those using it on multiple platforms might appreciate a consistent 'family' look. This is one of the things I'll be looking at, and striving to find the right balance and approach.

I'm predominantly a OS X user, so I'm particularly looking for (constructive!) feedback from users on other platforms. In the past, I'd always thought that the Mac was the only platform where where Opera looked like it didn't quite 'fit', but I need to be sure!

Please let me your thoughts via this simple survey form. Thanks for all your help!

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Opera desktop news

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Opera desktop news

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We are proud to announce the beta release of Opera Mini 4.2. You can download it from http://mini.opera.com/betaOpera Mini 4.2 beta will be installed next to your other Opera Mini version(s), so there's no need to delete anything before downloading the beta.

Here are the new features added since Opera Mini 4.1:

• Synchronize, edit and delete notes via Opera Link
  
• 24 new languages
  
• Better handling of RTSP, enabling more users to watch video
  
• Skins are back (along with new skins)
  
• "Accept" link at the end of the EULA (for BlackBerry users)
  

In addition we are now in the progress of enabling global load balancing for all our users. See the blog post for more info.

We hope you all enjoy this beta as much as us, and that you will provide feedback in our forum or directly in our feedback thread. Bugs can also be reported directly from Opera Mini (Menu -> Tools-> Help -> Bug report).

Known issues

As this is a beta, there are a couple of known issues. Here's a list of some of them:

• Some of the new languages are not fully translated for the beta, but will be fully supported for the final version.
  
• There are several issues with notes in Opera Link. Your device may not support viewing or editing of very large notes. Backup your notes before trying!
  

What is RTSP

RTSP is a protocol used for streaming media, such as videos. If your phone supports RTSP via Opera Mini, you should be able to play e.g. YouTube videos on your phone. These will not be played in Opera Mini, but by the media software in the device. We would like to remind those of you without a fixed data subscription that streaming media requires a lot of
data traffic, and can be very expensive. Depending on the device, you may have to configure a new access point before streaming works. Also, some devices will not do streaming unless they are connected via WiFi (we have seen this on BlackBerry).

Now we will do our best to finish the final release for you. Enjoy the beta! :)

Best regards,
The Opera Mini team

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Opera today released a preview of Opera Mini 4.2, the newest version of the world's most popular mobile Web browser that works on almost every mobile phone. With this beta release, Opera celebrates Opera Mini being the browser of choice for more than 20 million unique monthly users worldwide. As part of the celebration, Opera Mini users in the United States and Asia-Pacific region can now experience faster browsing speeds, due to the addition of an Opera Mini server park in the United States.

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In the wake of its recent Taiwanese customer announcements, Opera Software is expanding its presence by establishing a new office in Taipei, Taiwan. This office is part of Opera's strategic plan to grow business relationships in the market and to provide better customer service and technical support to key manufacturers and partners in Taiwan.

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Join members of the Internet Explorer team for the last  Expert Zone chat  of 2008 this Thursday, November 13th at 10.00 PST/18.00 UTC. These chats are a great opportunity to have your questions answered by members of the IE product team.

Thank you to all who have attended the chats through the year! Look for us to start these chats up again in January 2009. If you can’t join us online, all chat transcripts are published here.

Kristen Kibble
Program Manager

P.S. Upcoming IE chat dates are posted here.

Edit: Refreshed the links in the post and adjusted the UTC time.

[General IE Information ]
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Opera desktop news

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Opera devices news

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