Posts Tagged ‘Opera’

The past week has provided us with some interesting news.

First off, there’s been a hype of activity from both Webkit and Opera – Webkit’s blog kept us informed that it’s Acid3 DOM test score was increasing, it seemed every day, which ultimately led to it announcing on Wednesday that it had released a public build of a successful Acid3 rendering pass (but not an animation pass). This announcement came very soon (on the same day, in fact) after David announced that Opera’s latest internal build had passed all 100 DOM tests- it was just very unfortunate that some people misinterpreted this information and started accusing the Opera team of pulling stunts and deliberately trying to mislead – a sad state of affairs, especially because it came a result of this great news.

However this is not why I felt tearful.

MS decided to publish an article which details planned CSS support in the final release of IE8, which put a complete dampener on the day that I read it.

As I thought right from the start of talk of it’s release, CSS3 support is extremely disappointing, which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of features of CSS3. Well done Dean and the rest of the IE team- you’ve come up with yet another inferior browser.

which is guaranteed to slow the adoption of the fundamental layout-specific features of CSS3.

I’ve written a basic overview of the article. It mentions:-

• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo classes
• NO planned support for CSS3 pseudo elements
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Backgrounds and Borders module (no multiple backgrounds, background-size etc)
• NO planned support for CSS3 features in Color module (no RGBA, opacity etc)
• SOME support for Level 3 of Text module
• MINOR support for Basic UI module. Hardly surprising as the module currently has no owner, and there is no test suite Nice though to see that they’ve implemented box-sizing even though it’s with their own prefix.
• NO support for Multi-Column module.
• NO Media Query support

Before the announcement went public, I took it as a given that IE would HAVE to pass Acid2; looking back, it would have been simply astonishing if it hadn’t. But, now vendors are focusing on Acid3, which makes its predecessor completely redundant- with this in mind, there was absolutely no reason why the IE8 Acid2 pass story should have been as big as it was.

Up until now I’ve been impressed by Firefox for several reasons; what with it’s once pioneering level of standards compliancy I’ve found it a great platform to preview my sites on, going with the principle ‘code for FF, hack (workaround) for IE’. A biproduct of FF’s success has resulted with the guys at IE pulling their finger out and .

But recently however, I’ve become a bit discontent with it; as far as I’m concerned it’s lagging behind the competition somewhat.

In a , I investigated its latest nightly build and compared it to the competition- I found the results to be surprising. Using CSS.Info’s Selector Test, the latest nightly at that time only passed 36 out of the 43 tests, compared to Opera 9.5 Beta and the latest Webkit nightly with both of them passing all 43 tests. Being an advocate of progressive enhancement, I try and use these cutting-edge selectors wherever possible in my projects (nth-child rocks!). But with FF now having inferior CSS support, I need to move on to using another browser.

Really the only thing that was stopping me using another browser was FF’s superb Firebug. Opera’s David Storey has been recently mentioning on his blog about a current Opera project codenamed Dragonfly. Both Opera and David are being very secretive about what it actually is and the secrecy surrounding it has sparked much discussion in the web community as to what it could be- kudos to David and the Opera guys for building this hype; as far as I’m concerned it’s a breath of fresh air for vendors to be generating this kind of hype surrounding a product release.

I’m with the majority here, by thinking it’s probably some neat web developer tool – if this is the case, I’d switch to using Opera as my main browser immediately, saying goodbye to Firefox for good.