Opera mobile news

We got ourselves a stolen laptop. Who took it?

On Wednesday, July 9th, we announced the winners from our "Tell a friend" contest. We received a lot of great submissions, and three talented winners got to choose between one of the following sweet prizes:

• A brand new mobile phone
• A Nintendo Wii
• An XO OLPC, the famous $100 laptop

Long time community member Tamil chose the XO OLPC and he started waiting eagerly for the arrival of his new super cool computer...

And today (Tuesday, August 21st) he finally received it, but the parcel was torn apart —and even worse— there was no XO OLPC inside! It had been stolen! What gives!? :cry:

The plot thickens....

During our investigations today we've discovered that the parcel arrived empty and torn in India, so the OLPC has been stolen already before arrival in India.

Don't worry Tamil, we're on the case, and we will replace your stolen laptop! There shall be no such thing as "One Laptop per Criminal". :up:

In this article, Christopher Schmitt carries on his detailed exploration of what CSS3 has to offer us, looking at CSS3 attribute selectors that allow us to write selectors matching strings of text inside attribute values.

Once you go through this developer guide, you should be able to make widgets using the WCL (Widget Chrome Library). By using the library, the widgets will be resizable and work on multiple platforms, giving the user the best possible user experience on any device.

roc reports on the Web Fonts battle of which the short version is whether the non-IE browsers should support a DRM format for fonts. (And maybe also whether they can support TrueType and OpenType out of the box.) I don’t really think we should support a DRM format for fonts. It seems like it would set a bad precedent on the Web, might make vendors liable if they don’t enforce things right, and complicates matters for authors.

The W3C has created a draft charter for an EOT Working Group; EOT (Embedded OpenType) being the DRM format Microsoft is advocating. I have no idea how EOT is leading the Web to its full potential, but we’ll see what comes of it.

Aside from the format issue it might be worth considering to introduce a MIME type for fonts. (If this is too late for implementations at this point it might be too late.) The upside is that arbitrary files (say, a text/html file) will not be interpreted as fonts. The downside is that it makes things slightly harder for authors as they have to make sure they label it correctly. (On the Web images (except SVG) and JavaScript are not checked as to whether the resource has the correct MIME type. For images the browser sniffs the image signature and something loaded from a script element is simply executed (not so good, indeed).)

Given that support @font-face will be shipping soonish in Opera, Safari, and Firefox this would need to be decided soon. Probably before the relevant MIME type is standardized through the IETF. Another complication is that OpenType and TrueType can carry either otf and ttf as extension and the operating system deals with it fine. Having a single MIME type for both could probably work though, just like XHTML and SVG can both use text/xml.

So, should we try to go for something like font/opentype? Is there enough time?

Another article in Craig Grannell's fabulous series on design basics, in this article Craig gives us the lowdown on grid design basics - how to create a baseline grid in CSS, and how to position text on screen using it, with distances measured in both pixels and ems.

IE conditional comments aren't exactly a new phenomenon, but we felt that now was high time to publish Bruce's 2008 remix of his classic conditional comments article. Even now, with browser support having advanced greatly in terms of standards support, there is still a great need to support older versions of IE, and conditional comments help greatly in allowing you to achieve this without resorting to hacks.

The elephant in the corner of modern web development has been Ajax accessibility. The W3C has been working on a new technology called ARIA - Accessible Rich Internet Applications - that provides a way for "Web 2.0" developers to bridge the gap between desktop-like interaction and accessibility. When I was reading up on ARIA, I found that I couldn't see the big picture because the specifications focus on the detail. So we asked Gez Lemon of The Paciello Group, Juicy Studio and the Web Standards Project's Accessibility Task Force to write us an overview that would help developers understand what ARIA is, why it's important, and how they can use it right now to help users with disabilities.

This is the second in a series of articles written by R Blank giving practical advice on the business side of freelancing, including project management, contracts, budgeting and more. In this part he discusses budgeting, hot root vegetables and why working with new tech is similar to being a test pilot.

In-browser WYSIWYG editing is becoming an integral part of the Web. This article looks at the basic concepts and challenges involved in utilizing the editing features in recent browsers. It will startle you to learn that each browser behaves slightly differently—but this two-part article will save your sanity.

In this article David Storey introduces the remote debugging feature of Opera Dragonfly - Opera’s new developer tools. You'll learn how to set up Opera Dragonfly for remote debugging and how to connect Opera Mobile 9.5 to Opera Dragonfly, so you can debug content running directly on it.

The beta 1 release of Opera Mobile 9.5 is here, giving mobile users a great new browser to surf the Web with, but what does this mean for developers? In this article Chris Mills reveals just that, looking at mobile debugging with Opera Dragonfly, cross browser development techniques, and more.

In this article Ruud Steltenpool presents a very interesting experiment of his that allows you to change web page colours on the fly using SVG and JavaScript - the solution makes use of feColorMatrix, linearGradient and foreignObject, and is packaged up as bookmarklets to allow end-users to easily make use of it.

As seen in this discussion, the BBC site uses a map from maps.live.com - and all we Opera users get is an error message:

We're sorry but your browser does not support BBC Sport's Olympic map.

Looking into it, first there is some Opera-sniffing from the BBC itself that detects Opera and displays the warning instead of the map.

With that sniffing neutralised, the map loads - but shows the United States, not Beijing. Come one Live Maps, admit you're wrong by several thousand kilometers.. Or?

Not in the mood to admit any fault, the script instead spits out an error laying the blame on us:

JavaScript - http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympics/7493757.stm Timeout thread: delay 10 ms Error: name: Msn.Drawing.Exception message: Your Web browser does not support SVG or VML. Some graphics features may not function properly. stacktrace: Line 1 of linked script http://dev.virtualearth.net/mapcontrol/mapcontrol.ashx?v=6.1

So, my web browser does not support SVG, eh? Let's have a closer look at how you figured that out..

if(document.all) return new Msn.Drawing.VMLGraphic(e,b); else{if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("KHTML")!==-1) return new Msn.Drawing.SVGGraphic(e,b); var c=0,f=0,g=new RegExp("Firefox/(.*)"),d=g.exec(navigator.userAgent); if(d&&d.length;>=2){ var a=d[1].split("."); if(a){c=a[0]; f=a[1]; if(parseInt(c)>0&&parseInt;(f)>=5||parseInt(c)>=2) return new Msn.Drawing.SVGGraphic(e,b) } } throw new Msn.Drawing.Exception(L_GraphicsInitError_Text)

Yes, nothing but browser sniffing.. Not a single attempt at intelligent feature detection. Basically, by claiming Opera doesn't support SVG and can't load the map Microsoft is lying to the BBC and to our users.

Opera Team today released an update for its Opera 9.5 series web browser which is 9.52. The following release fixes quite a lot of issues in the following areas: user interface, mail, news, chat, display and scripting, security and more.

Changes since Opera 9.51

User Interface
Added several improvements to the icons and skin
Added a bookmark path to autocompleted bookmarks in the address bar to better distinguish them from visited pages
Added a Help button to “Engine Init() Failed” error message on start-up to inform users about a problem (more…)

Opera Software has released a second maintenance release of Kestrel, polishing the web browser up in several areas as well as addressing security related issues.

Security remains an important aspect of any web browser and unfortunately Opera Software had to address several again for this release. Some have a severe rating and makes this release immediately one that's recommended for any Opera user.

Besides security fixes this release adds some improvements to the new skin, a bookmark path to auto-completed bookmarks in the address bar to better distinguish them from visited pages, and other smaller improvements. Most importantly is that a load of other fixes landed into this release, both for the web browser, rendering engine, as well as mail, news, BitTorrent and IRC.

You can download the new release on Opera's web site, and read the full changelog here.

read more

Check out what's happening in the Opera community. :cool:

We've seen many interesting blog posts and photos shared during summer. Discussions in the forums has also been heated — as always. Here are some of the highlights we'd like to share with you:

Blogs & photos

• Violetisha decided to make some really cool avatars for the community. Maybe if you ask nicely, she'll do one of you, too?
• Popularity can be measured in many ways. Coxy is popular on Flickr because of his photo of Nina Kitty.
• 365 is a popular photo sharing group on My Opera. They've just started voting for best picture in July, and you can of course have a look at all the great photos.
• What has Mick planned for his arm? You can now vote for your favourite guess and read more about it in his blog.

Discussions

• Do you have a feature request for My Opera? Take part in the wish-list forum thread Tamil created some time ago.
• Encountered sites that block Opera or are not standards compliant? Take part in the discussion in our "Open the Web & Take Action" forum.
• User "dib" is wondering what ever happened to Opera spoofing other browsers?
• In the Opera for Mac forum we have a new user who asks: "Opera, still a bit confusing?" What are your thoughts on the subject?

Opera

• We released 9.52 today, which addresses several security and stability issues. You can read more about this release and find download links and changelogs in the desktop team blog.
• We got a new edition of our state of the Mobile Web report. We can conclude with Opera Mini usage soars globally as we spotlights the top sites in Latin America. Visit our mobile browsing report site for more information.
• An interesting article attempts to create the big picture future for Opera Mini. This article comes from the social blog site Mashable! and not the more computer oriented sites we're usually featured on.
• Wondering what happened to our refresh all keyboard shortcut? Look no further, here are all of the changes in keyboard shortcuts between Opera 9.23 and 9.50.

Opera mobile news

I've reached 100,000 posts in forums.

100,000 posts

Number of posts vs Month

Some vulnerabilities have been reported in Opera, which can be exploited by malicious people to conduct spoofing and cross-site scripting attacks, bypass certain security restrictions, disclose potentially sensitive information, or potentially compromise a user's system.


Be sure to check if your system is missing security updates or have insecure applications installed:
http://secunia.com/software_inspector/

Feature Overview - The Secunia Software Inspector:
* Detects insecure versions of applications installed
* Verifies that all Microsoft patches are applied
* Assists you in updating your system and applications
* Runs through your browser. No installation or download is required.