Opera is Working on Something Special?
It looks like Opera Software will be launching something quite interesting this year (probably).
As it was said in their latest post:
We are now putting together a crack team of software experts in Linköping, Sweden, that will work on some very exciting new stuff indeed. Of course I can’t tell you exactly what’s being developed in this top-secret Opera base, but its technology that’s able to transform the browser as we know it, using the latest computer hardware to our advantage.
Of course, they haven’t provided any more details yet.
If you are interested, feel free to check Job opportunities (User Interface / Desktop developers, Mail / Desktop Developers).
Some users already don’t like the unknown idea and rather have their Opera 9.5 fully fixed first.
Any ideas?
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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism career back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.
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yeah, any ideas what’s going on under the hood? Seems that they are preparing something…
besides, Opera has always been one of the internet pioneers, so the whole thing makes sense actually.
i’d really prefer that they introduce some ‘new’ and ‘innovative’ stuff like:
– inline spellchecker (INLINE not that aspel …)
– form autocomplete
– extensions system (zotero, piclens..)
– ability to form html mails
– ability to send ‘mail as an attatchment’
– compatibility with INDUSTRY standard of implementing NS plugin platform. opera is so strict with it, that many plugins give up and fail
– silverlight support (and do not tell me it is niche technology – NBC streams olimplics with it, and they dont give a damn, that opera refuses to support it)
list of similar features is miles long
untill then.. noone is even going to tryout the ‘new and awesome’, because opera now lacks BASIC stuff
do not believe me? lets see how is Dragonfly progressing. it has some ‘new’ stuff like that useless proxy debugging, but it fails at basics and is 5 years too late.
I’d love to see inline spell check and auto complete. All other (or most of them) browsers got that.
@ nobody
Well, silverlight sucks anyway, so… Also, I hope it tanks BAD, it’s against the openness of the internet. Just like Flash…
About the thing Opera’s doing, I’d be on some “Weave” clone. Or some “Prism” clone. Waddayasay?
i dont care that it is against ‘openess’ of web – some claim, that integrating ogg theora is also against it. you know, opinions are like axholes – everyone has got one.
and as for silverlight sucking. let me remind you, that people were telling the same exact thing when MS introduced .NET platform, vs 2003 line and windows 2003. guess what? this stuff now powers more buissiness applications than most other competitors combined. because MS delivered something so easy to use that it couldnt be resisted. silverlight is MANY MANY times easier to use than flash. and it has WHOLE .net platform behind it. it certainly doesnt suck.
and btw, id like for opera to present its solution to ‘closenes’ of the internet – some practical solution, instead of blindly limiting its users. opera does a lot of useless talk, but their reall achievements in the industry as for late are VERY limited.
SILVERLIGHT IN OPERA
http://blog.crazyboomerang.com/2007/12/silverlight-in-opera.html
“… using the latest computer hardware to our advantage”
this somewhat points to hardware accelerated graphics (which would push load to the GPU and thus would bring more free ressources to the cpu to do maybe some sophisticated things or would enable animations to not have too much impact on the cpu).
“http://blog.crazyboomerang.com/2007/12/silverlight-in-opera.html”
well, known issues:
“Keyboard input doesn’t work
Problems with drag and drop
On some sites don’t work
Opera sometimes crashes”
are you kidding? this is a whole lot of show stoppers, and page breakers. not some minor ‘known issues’..
summarising: silverlight DOES NOT work with Opera.
I have to agree with a lot of what @nobody said. It seems as if Opera wants to hold onto their ‘inovative and different’ crown that they have left behind some now basic features for too long. I’d much prefer to see a lot more of the 9.5 bugs fixed, especially given how old some of the reported bugs are, around from 9.2 and earlier.
That said i agree with @serrious, didn’t opera labs release a hardware accelerated build at one point? or was that firefox…. Also with the 3d canvas and video element as well, seems to point to hardware accel.
There’s been (“private”) Firefox builds with hardware acceleration through Glitz ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitz_(software) ) for a year or so at least. I think I read somewhere that they ran into some sort of problems with Glitz, so they’re going to build something new instead.
(opengl) – Render using OpenGL [2002-09-24] ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=opengl )
Linked from the above, “Need to implement XUL3D” [2001-06-12] ( https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85586 )
“Some users already don’t like the unknown idea and rather have their Opera 9.5 fully fixed first.”
The people who complain about this don’t realize that Opera is a huge company that has multiple job titles. They have dedicated desktop team employees and dedicated Opera mini employees. Likewise, they are trying to get dedicated top-secret employees. This won’t impede the progress of 9.5 being fully fixed in the least.
opera is a medium-sized company at most, and company that pays huge overhead for having lots of small overseas offices. these will get disbanded at first sight of financial troubles.
another issue – opera seems to completly stop any form of competing with firefox (they compete on fields totaly irrelevant to real world like acid and html5) and they dont seem to have ANY vision of where to head.
and finaly – they do not give any reason to believe, that they are ABLE to fix opera mounting regressions, rendering incompatibilities, various mayor usability and functional issues and drawbacks.
last version of opera was a side step, not a step forwards – they havent introduced any of long awaited, industry standards like these mentioned in first comment – they havent really introduced anything usefull. opera link.. well, ok, when it works it is ok, but is it all?
9.5 was to be a breaktrough in website compatibility – it isnt, anybody can see it, there is no breaktrough in plugin compatiblity (we have to use FIREFOX wmv plugin (that requires ff to be present in a system to install!) to watch wmv content without constant crashing), youtube works 5 times out of 10, other media sites do not work at all etc etc etc. silverlight was PROMISED by opera to work in 9.5 and in SL 2.0 version. it was a LIE.
they better disband their lame secret team (nothing really good came out from opera labs in 3or more years) and start working on BASICS.
oh, their developer tools.. laughable, sorry, it these are simply laughable.