Category: Development

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Opera BrowserWe may soon have a winner! It looked like WebKit was going to be the first to pass the Acid3 test, passing 98 of 100 sub-tests earlier today, but internal builds of Opera pulled ahead, and have just reached 100/100!

This doesn’t constitute passing the full test, as the resulting page needs to look exactly like the reference image, but it means they’re very close.

These fixes won’t appear in the upcoming Opera 9.5, since it’s in the stabilization phase as it approaches release (just like any new Acid3-related changes in Firefox won’t make it into Firefox 3), but will probably find their way into the next major version.

We’re in the home stretch. Opera’s nearly there, but WebKit is close behind. WebKit could still catch up while Opera polishes off the rendering issues, in which case Safari would be the first browser to pass both Acid2 and Acid3.

Congratulations to the Opera team, and best of luck in the final lap of the race!

SafariUpdate: Just a few hours later, and WebKit has caught up, also passing 100/100. And as they point out, it’s a public build, one you can download and try out yourself! The race to pass is going to be very close. Though at this point, it’s almost certain that WebKit will be the first to be publicly accessible.

(via CSS3.info. More at OperaWatch and The Good Life.)

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FirefoxOne of the biggest complaints about Firefox since 1.5 was released has been its high memory usage. Go to a forum anywhere and you’ll get people griping about “have they fixed the leak yet?”

It is, of course, much more complicated than that. There are caches, fragmentation, places where memory is used inefficiently, bunches of small leaks, leaks that only happen under specific circumstances, leaks in extensions, leaks triggered by combination of extensions, etc.—not one single leak that can be fixed. And then there was the unfortunate post in which one Mozilla developer (I’m too lazy to look up who) pointed out that 1.5 stored more information in memory, and that probably had a bigger impact on total memory size than actual leaks, which many people on the Internet jumped on as “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.” (Why should they bother to read what was actually stated, when they can just read a misleading but sensational summary?)

A lot of the small leaks were patched in bugfix releases for 1.5 and 2.0, but really big changes are coming in Firefox 3. Mozilla’s Pavlov has written a detailed post on Firefox 3 Memory Usage, describing the different categories of memory improvements that have been made in the Firefox 3 development cycle.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find that this is one of the big reasons Firefox 3 has taken so much longer than previous releases. I suspect it’s time well spent, though, and users will be happier with a later, lighter Firefox than with one that shipped earlier, but used just as much memory.

(via Asa Dotzler)

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Opera Software has just released the first preview of Opera 9.5, code-named Kestrel.* It’s still a long way off from a beta, but the weekly previews should satisfy both web developers and fans of the Opera web browser.

In addition to Opera’s own page, Cybernet News has posted a run-down of new features. Improved compatibility with existing websites is, as always, at the top of the list. There are reportedly improvements in support for rich-text forms. Coupled with Opera’s outreach to libraries like FCKEditor, we should see more of these forms working in Opera soon.

Synchronizing bookmarks and cookies is nice, but what I really want is something that will not only keep multiple installations of Opera in sync, but will also keep that list in sync with Firefox and Safari.

The full-history search is going to be really nice once I’ve done some new surfing. I can’t count the number of times I’ve wanted to bring up a page but couldn’t remember the name of the site, or needed to find a particular page on a site that gives every single page the same title. It doesn’t seem to be able to find anything from before I upgraded (yeah, I’m living dangerously, upgrading to an alpha), so it must index sites as you visit them, rather than converting the existing cache.

As a web developer, I’m most interested in the improvements to the rendering engine. David Storey posted a summary of new CSS features a few days back, and the changelog has a detailed—and fascinatingly long!—list of all the new and updated capabilities. I’m thrilled to finally have text-shadow in more than just WebKit, but was really hoping for border-radius and box-shadow support. (I’ve been having fun with the Safari 3 betas.) I should be more excited by the improved CSS selectors** support, but until Firefox or Safari implements the rest of them, we’ll still be stuck with the more broadly-supported subset. (Fortunately it looks like, as Konqueror switches from KHTML to WebKit, they’ll be merging KHTML’s capabilities into WebKit. That will give us full support in 2 of 4 major browser engines.)

Opera Mini - The free Web browser for nearly any phoneOpera is also gearing up a new version of Opera Mini, the free browser for cell phones, having just released a beta of version 4. I keep meaning to check and see what data plan I need to be able to use it, because the built-in browser on my RAZR V3T is…extremely limited. There was a brief period last year in which T-Mobile let everyone use networked applications, and even Opera Mini 2 was leaps and bounds ahead of the Motorola browser.

Between Opera Mini and Safari on the iPhone, the mobile web seems to be really opening up in a way that people were scoffing at just a year ago.

*The name Kestrel always makes me think of Queen of Wands these days, which is better than always making me think of the Hawk & Dove villain.

**Current CSS Selectors support out of 43 selectors:
IE6: 10 + 1 partial
IE7: 13 + 4
Opera 9.23: 25 + 3
Safari 3 beta: 25 + 9
Firefox 2: 26 + 10
Firefox 3 alpha: 32 + 4
Konqueror 3.57: 43
Opera 9.5 alpha: 43

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Overly-cute fox with puppy-dog eyes, captioned: Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standardsThe Mozilla Developer Center has just posted some desktop wallpaper promoting open standards, (and the MDC itself) with the theme, “Please don’t hurt the web. Use open standards.”

Apparently the design was a big hit as a poster at SXSW.

For those who haven’t seen it, the MDC is a great developer resource for web developers, describing lots of standards along with Mozilla-specific information.

(via Rhian @ SFX, who notes that the image is available for use under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. These wallpapers are also covered by the Mozilla Trademark Policy.)

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This is good news: Mozilla will be working more closely with various Linux distributors including Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, and yes, even Debian, to coordinate Firefox updates, configuration, etc.

There are two main issues: making Mozilla’s Firefox installer work everywhere (it mostly does, but on some systems you need to install some compatibility libraries first), and keeping the distributions’ versions in sync with the official one.

After the Debian IceWeasel debacle, and Fedora deciding to skip Firefox 2 and wait for Firefox 3, it’s good to know that Mozilla has recognized the problem and is working on it. One key piece of information: Red Hat and Novell will both be providing extended support for Firefox 1.5 past its official EOL next April.

(via Fedora Weekly News)