The mobile Web as a global phenomenon. The ubiquity of the mobile phone makes it the ideal platform for many people to access the Web. The demand is there. As we saw in our previous report on Africa, many countries experienced triple-digit or even quadruple-digit usage growth in 2008.

Here are some highlights from this month's State of the Mobile Web report:

• Usage, page views and data transfers rose again this month; 21 million users viewed 5 billion pages in October 2008.

• Egypt, which debuted last month by knocking Germany off the list, continues to take the top 10 by storm, surging ahead of both the United Kingdom and Poland in terms of unique users of Opera Mini.

• This month's geographic focus is on Southeast Asia, where we see Google as the dominant player in the search engine space and Friendster as the premier social-networking site, with hi5 coming in second. Nokia is dominant in the region, with brands like Sony Ericsson and Huawei competing for a distant second place.

Read the full report.

We're hereby announcing My Opera's participation in the second annual Blue Beanie Day. Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 with thousands of Standardistas to show your support for Web standards and accessibility.

About Blue Beanie Day

Blue Beanie Day is the brainchild of Doug Vos, creator of the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook. Since October 27, 2007, over 4,300 members have joined, representing over fifty countries and with My Opera's involvement there's bound to be many more!

Doug invented Blue Beanie Day in 2007 to promote awareness of web standards. Blue Beanie Day 2007 can be found on Facebook — visit the event page.

Friday, November 28, 2008 is the day thousands of Standardistas (people who support Web standards) will wear a Blue Beanie to show their support for accessible, semantic Web content.

Participate!

We're hereby announcing the My Opera community's participation in the second annual Blue Beanie Day! Please join us on Friday, November 28, 2008 to show your support and love for Web standards and accessibility.

How to participate:

• Join the Blue Beanie group on My Opera.

• Get your picture taken wearing a blue beanie* on Friday November 28.

• On November 28, switch your profile picture and post your royal blueness to the Blue Beanie Day 2008 photo group at Flickr and to the Blue Beanie group photo album on My Opera. That’s all there is to it!

So, who's in? I know I am! :cool:

* Web professionals "down under" and in otherwise summery climates can subsitute the beanie for a blue cap. :)

Opera mobile news

During the last few months I have gotten myself another permanent residence (especially after they got WiFi), a Chinese restaurant here in Prague. I spend more waking hours there than I do at home.

Eating, drinking, socialising, and being on the Internet has occupied large parts of my life anyway, but I enjoy organising as well. Today the first major event I've helped with, a night at the Opera, will be live this night. For Opera employees in Oslo this may be familiar, the Underwater pub nearby the Opera HQ has opera nights Tuesdays and Thursdays, and have had it for years, and it is a favourite Opera hangout.

Still, the Chinese-Czech musical connection is fascinating and appealing, we'll see how it works out tonight. See you there?

send9 has discovered a vulnerability in Opera, which potentially can be exploited by malicious people to compromise a user's system.

http://secunia.com/Advisories/32752/

NOTE: This RSS feed does not include information about updated Secunia advisories. You should note that Secunia on average issues more than 20 updated advisories per day, containing information about exploit and patch availability, new and in depth research, and all other details that are relevant. Learn more about receiving complete and customised Secunia advisory information:
http://secunia.com/advisories/business_solutions/

Since yesterday's release we've run into some startup problems. Here's a list of identified and known issues with the current site. You can also help if you've identified any bugs.

Since yesterday's release we've run into some startup problems. We're working hard to get all the new cool features on My Opera back up and running again. Thanks for your patience and understanding on this matter.

If you have a bug which is not identified and listed below, please report it in this forum post.

Known issues

1. My Opera might be slow from time to time as we continue optimization. This is a known issue and if you experience proxy errors, no response or general slowness this is something we're working to fix as soon as possible.

2. Profile images and avatars are not showing. We're currently using a temporary image placeholder. Your image and avatar is not removed or deleted. All data is restored and you will have your profile picture and avatar back soon. Edit: Fixed! :hat:

3. Activity Feed. The newly added feed to My Opera is currently deactivated due to performance issues. This will be fixed soon.

4. After sorting pictures in a photo album it does not save, but simply redirects to the edit page. Yes, this is confirmed too. We're fixing it. :)

5. We have reports on Swedes visiting where My Opera automatically thinks they're Norwegian... Well, this is unfortunate (whether this is a bug or a "feature" can be discussed), but the site should be displayed in English if your native language is not supported.

People keep complaining about HTML5's error handling. It looks like a lot of people believe that because the standard includes error handling, all content will be considered valid.

This statement is wrong and repeating it doesn't make it true. Yet even Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself seems to express a concern that HTML5 represents changes of philosophy about improving the web as opposed to letting it fester while describing it.

This is probably the greatest misunderstanding about HTML5. Let's get this straight..

• Understanding error handling is an absolute requirement for improving HTML and the Web while being compatible with current content.
  
• Invalid documents are still invalid.
  
• HTML5 browsers will not "gloss over" invalidity any more than the current HTML4 browsers already do.
  

On the contrary, I believe that the level of detail in HTML5's error handling will make browsers and validators report more useful error messages. This will make it easier to write valid HTML.

Look at the spec. Right now I find 178 instances of the expression "parse error" in the spec text. These parse errors are validity errors that validators will and browsers may report to the user. (The spec can't dictate browsers to do so because it's a UI decision how to do it, but I'm fairly sure that Firefox, Safari and Opera will all use their existing error consoles / web developer tools to show HTML5 parse errors. After all, these errors should be so useful it would be a competitive drawback for a developer tool not to show them).

Having web browsers and validators report the same errors will help authors understand HTML and well-formedness. Today, authors who try to use the validator are baffled when the validator says a document has lots of problems, yet it works fine in browsers and they don't complain about errors. This confuses authors and makes them distrust or ignore the validator warnings.

Tomorrow, HTML5-compliant validators and browsers will report the same errors, and HTML authors will be less confused and more enlightened as a result. Hence, specifying error handling with the detail the HTML5 spec is doing should in fact contribute to improving the quality of the markup out there on the web.

Murphy's law strikes again -- if something can go wrong, it will.

After roughly 6 hours just getting everything out, we ended up having hard to track down problems which led the site to feel like the "good old days".

After 6 more hours we finally traced down the root cause of the problems and have disabled the new way of serving user pictures and the latest activity feed. That means that the big user picture of you will not be shown just yet, but we recommend using a mirror in the meantime, and if you want to know what your friends are up to, give them a call, or ask them out till we get things sorted ;)

We apologize for any inconvinience and the long wait. However we hope you enjoy the fresh design, the localization, the bug fixes, and the quick responsiveness of the site.

We hope to track down the final ghost as soon as possible, after eating some pills...

Oh and we already have some, mostly UI, fixes going on, but it has to wait some hours ;)

Welcome to new and improved My Opera! This release is a big one. Development is finally done and we can now all enjoy a faster and better looking My Opera.

This release is a big one. We've focused on performance, stability and adding new functionalities. This is to make My Opera an even better surfing experience on PC/Mac and mobile phones. As you may notice, the community section (this section ;) has been given a new look and feel. We're very happy with the end result and feel this is a step in the right direction forward.

When you log in for the first time you'll see a different page than what you're used to. This is your new personal (and very private) home page on My Opera. Here you'll have easy access to news and cool activities happening in the community. We suggest you spend a bit of time to get used to it.

We would personally like to thank dantesoft, Tamil, thobi, rose-marie, sgunhouse, remcolanting, coxy, BAMAToNE, WillYum and Ramunas for beta testing and providing feedback along the way.

New and improved My Opera features

• New fresh My Opera look

  We've tried to keep My Opera fresh, clean and easy on the eye and we really hope you like it. This look in particular has been worked alongside with new www.opera.com. We want to have a more unified browsing experience when visiting our new Web sites. You can also highlight and influence more what others see on My Opera by using the "spotlight" function when you're logged and surf around on your friends blogs.

• Now available in 5 languages

  You can now have most parts of My Opera's user interface translated into Norwegian, Chinese, Italian and Spanish. You can change language using the drop down menu available at the bottom of this page. More languages such as Vietnamese, Japanese, etc. will follow soon.

• 1 GB of free storage space

  We've upped the ante! Another reason to celebrate. :) We wanted to give everyone more free storage space because, well... We want to see more of your stuff! More photos, more blog posts, more good stuff!

• Friends activity feed on home page

  View a live and direct list based upon your friend's latest activities in the community. This list is generated based on mutual agreement between you and your friend (you both have to each other added as a friend). This is an exciting new feature and we will continue development in the future and add many extra functionalities to it. This is a first version we hope you'll appreciate.

• Now you can help moderate too

  On all forums posts and album pictures you can now report it as offensive and/or violating our terms of service or guidelines. The report feature is your way to further help us make sure My Opera's spam free and that we don't have any nasty pictures. All reports will be investigated by a My Opera moderator. :)

• New blog themes

  New My Opera users will now have a slick blog theme which fits perfectly with the official My Opera look. You can also try it out if you want from "My page", "Account" and "Design". There's also a new theme called “In the Shadows”. We recommend you check them out....

• Mobile optimized site

  There has been a lot of mobile optimizations for this release! For example, we now use smaller pictures for faster loading while surfing the site on mobile. You can even see how My Opera would like on a mobile be clicking "view mobile site" at the bottom of this page. :cool:

• Slideshow for photo albums

  A cool slideshow has been added for all photo albums. Simple click the "view slideshow" button in albums overview for a full screen slide show of your photos (note: not yet available for mobile phones).

• Redesigned messages interface

  Friendlier interface for viewing messages. You can now also see your friends avatars. More improvements will follow later. :)

• Massive code improvements

  We've rewritten a huge percentage of the entire code on My Opera! This is a huge step in order to deliver more, better and faster features for you in the future. It will greatly allow us to grow the community even more. :up:

• Easy access to Opera Link

  The new Opera Link drop down menu allows you to quicker and easier access your synchronised content. It also allows you to merge duplicate bookmarks — read more about Opera Link.

• Member of the weeks

  Want to know who member of the week was? Well... Now you can! Check out the new motw archive.

• HTML tweaks

  While adding new features and improving old ones, we had to tweak the HTML code a bit. Please check your CSS if you have any. Small changes have been made to "friends", "latest visitors" and "latest comments". Some more changes has also been made to the photo albums section and the top menu is now placed inside the #wrap3 div (on most designs). Feel free to ask any questions about this.

• Bug fixes

  A lot of bug fixes are included in this release. How many? We lost count... It's that many! :) Thanks to all who reported bugs in the forums and participated in the private beta testing.

• And...!

  A whole lot more stuff you'll discover while surfing the site! For example; check out the editor’s picks photo albums... ;)

Here are 10 absolutely stunning autumn photos we think is worth checking out. All of these photographers are active community members on My Opera and make great use of the photo albums service.

Here are 10 absolutely stunning autumn photos we think is worth checking out. All of these photographers are active community members on My Opera and make great use of the photo albums service.

1Beatiful autumn leaf. Photo by Dr. Tess.

2You can never go wrong with red. Photo by nararit.

3A park with almost too many colors. Photo by musickna.

4Just a few single leaves left... Photo by zetorres.

5Crispy sunrise. Photo by the Autumn Photo Network.

6Great color mixture on a wooden wall. Photo by bfdolphin.

7Fantastic motion in the waterfall. Photo by Gruesome.

8Almost as idyllic as The Shire. Photo by ALLY_G.

9Even kittens love the autumn! Photo by Kriszti.

10Leaf in the water. Photo by DuckyChickenLady.

Opera mobile news

Hi! Today we're launching a new version of My Opera. We have a new fresh look, 1GB of free space, localized interface in 7 languages (and more coming soon), a friends activity feed, an API for embedding My Opera photos on other sites, slideshows for the photo albums and much more. :)

This time we also had a bit of beta testing along the way. Special thanks to dantesoft, Tamil, thobi, rose-marie, sgunhouse, remcolanting, coxy, BAMAToNE, WillYum and Ramunas for helping out.

Design

As the lead My Opera designer I wanted to give the new site a strong visual identity with that special Opera feeling. The goal was to make a simple and functional design that highligted the content rather than just beeing decorative. I also wanted to simplify the site and make it easier to access features such as Opera Link. The new design is also made to fit well with the upcoming launch of our new Opera.com site.

For those of you that write your own blog CSS, you might want to read about the HTML changes.

Mobiles

The new My Opera features many optimizations for mobiles and there's even a function where you can view the mobile optimized version by clicking a button at the bottom of each page. We hope that this will inspire those of you who have not yet tried out Opera's excellent mobile browsers! :)

If you are already using a mobile to browse My Opera you might notice that you will, in most cases, get the mobile optimized version by default. If you want the full version you can switch to it by clicking the button in the footer, but we recommend using the optimized version as it's not just mobile friendly CSS but also smaller images and less code to make it faster.

Localization

One of the main features of the new site is localization. I'll let our lead developer Cosimo say a few words about that:

We started working on localizing My Opera around March this year. Initially this was thought to be impossible very hard with the existing architecture, but we tried to build the internationalization engine to be as simple and standard as possible, planning and documenting even the limitations. It's based on gettext and PO files. We even worked ourselves on the translations, and of course the italian is mine. So you can complain to me for that one :)

In the long-term this has been a fairly good choice. In the meantime we also refined our internal tools. One is a command line application that converts the PO files that translators hand us into some ready-to-use code that is loaded at runtime by the application servers.

The integration with our templating engine has been a bit tricky, but now it works whatever templating system we will choose in the future. The most exciting thing about the I18N "layer" has been when I first saw My Opera translated in Japanese and Chinese. Really exciting!

Scalability

We have made a lot of front-end and back-end improvements to speed up the site and increase scalability. Cosimo:

Work on application code and backends has been frantic in the last months. Some of the improvements that we have introduced are:

• the skins section is much faster now, because all skin thumbnails are served statically using our new static.myopera.com server.
• we have a full-page cache now, so many of the most used My Opera pages are served statically now, with a fine-grained control of how/when a request can be cached. Basically we took the ~20 most used pages and we cached them completely. Then we update those cached version every now and then... :)

We know there's still a lot to do. We will concentrate on improving the database performance to avoid proxy errors. Specially since some of the new features (activities feed, etc) will stress the database even more!

We have good idea of what is failing and why, thanks to a cool ajax monitoring application we wrote in our "spare" time. If you are interested in our scalability challenges and how we plan to solve them, take a look at a talk I gave at the last Perl Workshop in Italy. It's slightly outdated, but you can get the basic ideas.

Friends feed

Another important goal for the new My Opera was to increase activity and make it easier for you to communicate with your friends and follow their activities on the site. One of the main features for this is the friends feed. The feed is activated when you and your friend have both added each other as friends on My Opera. It does not activate if it's just a one way friendship.

Looking ahead

We hope that you like the new My Opera. It might be a bit shaky the first few days, as we have released a lot of new code, but we are sure it will be great. A lot of work has gone into this release and we see this as a good platform to build on.

Finally, a big thanks to the entire My Opera team and all of you My Opera members that make this a great community! :cool::happy::cheers::hat:

Your favorite community site will be taken down for a huge upgrade 2008-11-18 from 08:00 a.m. UTC. Downtime is estimated to be at least for 4 hours. Both My Opera and Dev Opera will be inaccessible during maintenance.

Your favorite community site will be taken down for a huge upgrade tomorrow 2008-11-18 from 08:00 a.m. UTC. Downtime is estimated to be at least for 4 hours. Both My Opera and Dev Opera will be inaccessible during maintenance.

Lead Web designer Fred has already made a post in the devblog about HTML changes you can expect in tomorrow's release, in case you want to prepare your CSS for the release.

Also, the maintenance page will include something special, so be sure to check it out tomorrow if you can. :sherlock:

We're about to release a new version of My Opera. The release contains some HTML changes. This might affect you if you have written your own custom CSS, but the changes are moderate and it should be fairly easy to adjust the CSS.

The first thing we did was to switch from XHTML to HTML. Yes, we believe that HTML is the way to go and we finally got rid of that xml prologue that caused "some old browsers" to go into quirks mode. You will also notice that it's now somewhat easier to read the code when you view the source.

You do not need to edit any XHTML content that you might have included in your old posts - it will automatically be transformed to HTML when the page is rendered.

For most blog themes we have also moved the #myo menu div inside the #wrap3 div. This means that the My Opera top menu will be as wide as your page, instead of stretching over the entire browser window. (there are a few blog themes that still have the #myo div outside the wrapping div's)

Blog sidebar

For the new My Opera we wanted to standardize the image sizes. We used to have 29 different sizes for each user photo! This was way too much and we now have only 4. This made us update the HTML/CSS to fit better with the new images.

The standard width for the sidebar is now 240 px.

The image sizes for the friends list in the sidebar used to be 102x77. It's now 104x78.

The images sizes for the latest comments used to be 45x43. It's now 40x30.

The images sizes for the recent visitors used to be 64x48. It's now 68x51.

Friends

The image sizes for the friends page used to be 169x127. It's now 104x78. The location field was also removed to simplify the page.

Photo albums

Changes have been made to the photo albums code. In essence we have made it into a list rather than just div's.

Photo albums overview. OLD code:

1. <div class="albums">
2. <div class="album1">
3. <div class="albumthumb1">
4. <a href="#">
5. <img src="#" width="160" height="120" alt="" class="albumimage" />
6. </a>
7. </div>
8. <div class="albumnfo">
9. <h3><a href="#">Title</a></h3>
10. <p class="imagecount"><b>Images:</b> xx</p>
11. <div class="albdesc">Description</div>
12. </div>
13. <div class="clear"> </div>
14. </div>
15. <div class="album2">
16. <div class="albumthumb2">
17. <a href="#">
18. <img src="#" width="160" height="120" alt="" class="albumimage" />
19. </a>
20. </div>
21. <div class="albumnfo">
22. <h3><a href="#">Title</a></h3>
23. <p class="imagecount"><b>Images:</b> xx</p>
24. <div class="albdesc">Description</div>
25. </div>
26. <div class="clear"> </div>
27. </div>
28. </div>

Photo albums overview. NEW code:

1. <ul class="nobullets" id="albums">
2. <li class="album1">
3. <a href="#" class="albumimage">
4. <img src="#" width="280" height="210" alt="">
5. </a>
6. <h3><a href="#">Description</a></h3>
7. <p class="imagecount"><b>Images:</b> xx</p>
8. <div class="albdesc">Description</div>
9. </li>
10. <li class="album2">
11. <a href="#" class="albumimage">
12. <img src="#" width="280" height="210" alt="">
13. </a>
14. <h3><a href="#">Description</a></h3>
15. <p class="imagecount"><b>Images:</b> xx</p>
16. <div class="albdesc">Description</div>
17. </li>
18. </ul>

Photo album view. OLD code:

1. <div id="mypix">
2. <div class="thumb1">
3. <div>
4. <a href="#"><img src="#" alt="" width="320" height="240" /></a>
5. </div>
6. <p class="photoinfo right photocomments">
7. <a href="#">x comments</a>
8. </p>
9. <p class="photoinfo photoviews">
10. xx views
11. </p>
12. </div>
13. </div>
14. <div class="thumb2">
15. <div>
16. <a href="#"><img src="#" alt="" width="320" height="240" /></a>
17. </div>
18. <p class="photoinfo right photocomments">
19. <a href="#">x comments</a>
20. </p>
21. <p class="photoinfo photoviews">
22. xx views
23. </p>
24. </div>
25. </div>
26. </div>

Photo album view. NEW code:

1. <ul class="nobullets" id="mypix">
2. <li class="pic1">
3. <a href="#" class="thumb"><img src="#" alt="" width="320" height="240"></a>
4. <p class="photoinfo right photocomments">
5. <a href="#">x comments</a>
6. </p>
7. <p class="photoinfo photoviews">
8. xx views
9. </p>
10. </li>
11. <li class="pic2">
12. <a href="#" class="thumb"><img src="#" alt="" width="320" height="240"></a>
13. <p class="photoinfo right photocomments">
14. <a href="#">x comments</a>
15. </p>
16. <p class="photoinfo photoviews">
17. xx views
18. </p>
19. </li>
20. </ul>

While Internet Explorer 7 had only one good feature (are you curious now?), the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is slowly becoming a real web browser. But is it enough?

Standards Support

Web developers doomed IE7. Hours of wasted time, checking… Yes, it still breaks a web. Let’s do more coding… It took a while for Microsoft to realize that it’s a good thing for any web browser to support web standards. Internet Explorer 8 is their 1st correct step in building friendly relationships with web developers. Hope it will not break the web (again).

Is IE8 Really Different?

The upcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser is probably one of the most awaited releases. And it’s not only because of some great features such as search suggestions, visual search, tab grouping, web slices and many more… (most of them were already integrated to Firefox, Safari, Opera long time ago) but due to web standards support and the way Microsoft thinks now on what IE should really be.

Conclusion?

Microsoft learned from Windows Vista release (one of the worst releases ever?) and began Windows 7 development which will fix what makes Vista so bad. Performance, annoying messages, compatibility (Windows 7 will use same core), etc.

Same for Internet Explorer, 7th release was bad. They have realized that and started to develop IE8. Is it any good? It supports web standards, it is much faster and more user friendly (in terms of web experience) and it’s finally a web browser. So to answer this topic question… It’s too early for any final conclusions, but I do believe that IE8 is going to be a really pleasant web browser and can drastically slow down Internet Explorer market share losing. It can’t win this battle because it’s the 1st release only. However, Microsoft made a first right step and it’s a good thing.

There is 1 more thing which MS should learn… It’s a development cycle. With the budget like that it makes you wonder why they are developing IE so slowly. It’s not Windows and neither Office where users can wait few years for the next release. There are some strong competitors out there. Fix this and you are ready to go.

Internet Explorer 7 Good Feature?

So what about that good Internet Explorer 7 feature? It is market share losing.

Hello everyone! There's plenty of coverage to peruse this week with the release of Opera Mini 4.2. This week's featured article analyzes the mobile browsing market and Opera Mini is in a great position — "As Mobile Web Usage Explodes, Full-Featured Browsers on Smartphones See Strongest Growth".

Opera in the news

Opera Mini 4.2 hits beta

Opera Mini 4.2 beta goes live

Nintendo DSi

Opera Mini 4.2 beta is a mini update

New Opera Nintendo DSi Browser

This week's spotlight shines on a very popular blogger who's "tapping away in the middle of the night" from Australia.

This week's spotlight shines on a very popular blogger who's "tapping away in the middle of the night" from Australia.

It helps having good friends in the right place as we've received several recommendations that this particular member deserves to be in the Opera spotlight. :)

We're very puzzled that this member has not yet been member of the week. He should have been it long, long time ago. Anyway, congratulations on (finally) becoming member of the week, clean! You're a :star: in the My Opera community!

Have a great weekend and here's for two more great years! :cheers:

Opera Mini 4.2 beta has been out for three days, so everyone has had a chance to put the browser to a test. Now, we want to hear your opinion, specifically on one of the new features: The six new skins.

Opera Mini 4.2 beta has only been out for three days, so everyone has had a chance to put the little browser to a test. Now, we want to hear those opinions, specifically on one of the main new features: The six new skins (have a look on the new skins on www.operamini.com/beta).

So, here's your chance to let us know what you think! The following poll asks you to select which of the skins looks the best. And please, tell us why you feel the way you do. You are helping us make Opera Mini better through your feedback. :)

Also, if you’re feeling creative, please include a link to an image of your own ideas of Opera Mini skins. :hat:

Via Choose Opera.

The winner of the Second Weekly X-Challenge Prize is .... (drum rolls please ... ) ... (yes I know, the "Oscar" type effect doesn't work quite perfectly here ... but what the heck) ...

Winner widget: WebChat
Author: Devyatkin Gleb a.k.a. SovGVD
Prize: $300 Amazon gift card and some goodies ;)

Congratulations :cheers: !! Now we know why you were so nervous all this while :p Clearly SovGVD has put in some good work into his widget and impressed us enough to grab the prize. You should be getting a mail from us soon as a confirmation, and we'll send across your prize right away. Oh yes, and do remember to send us your t-shirt size ;)

So guys, there's still one week left to go and still quite a few prizes to win. The three mega prizes, a weekly prize and there's still space for the 20 early bird prizes :yes: . You can read all about the competition rules here.

So, till next week ... G'luk !!!:up: