Opera 11.50 Released

An anonymous reader writes "With a shiny new version of Presto that's apparently up to 20% faster, cool tweaks to Speed Dial, and a bunch of other features and bug fixes, the crazy Norwegians have just launched the latest version of desktop Opera."

Re:Mail clients still in the 90s?

[bberens]

IMHO this would be terrible. I like Gmail as much as the next guy.. it's my primary e-mail "client" but the most common feature I use in Outlook that is missing is sort by column. I use it constantly. The excellent search feature in gmail is a poor substitute. Also turning the "from" e-mail address on an e-mail you read into a meaningful contact is quite difficult in Gmail in comparison to outlook.

Re:An irrilevant poll

[gsnedders]

To speak as an Opera employee (albeit only for the past couple of years â" two years tomorrow, actually) for once:

While certainly some people in the company vehemently defended it, as you put it, the number of people internally who'd say that it wasn't a problem for us to fix were in a minuscule minority. Certainly, from around a decade ago, we've ended up with more non-standard IE extensions implemented than FF have, which led some sites to work better in Opera than FF, though on others (to this day) sends us down the wrong code-path due to broken browser-sniffing.

I'm not really convinced it was the market that pushed site-compat to get to where it was today: it was more the gradual effort over a number of years towards it, and in general on the web you're either fairly badly broken (as Opera was) or stuff pretty much works (as all major browsers are like now).

To be fair, there have also been cultural changes within the company. For example, we have over three times the number of automated tests today than we had when I started, which has massively reduced the number of regressions, thus allowing developer time to be spent more on fixing bugs once.

Note that with 10.50 we introduced an entirely new JS engine, which worked with pretty much the same amount of the web as the one in 10.10. That's what I've spent the majority of my last couple of years working on, and the fact we shipped it working just as well as the previous engine, having developed it in less than half the time that it took V8 to reach beta, is a testament to our testing nowadays.

We don't have the thousands of users of every nightly FF and Chrome have â" we very much have to get it right first time, and that presents a far harder challenge, yet now, we are succeeding. Hurrah!

One final note on Google Apps: they don't officially support us, quite often doing stuff using non-standard stuff (often with one codepath for IE, using non-standard stuff; one codepath for FF, using different non-standard stuff; and yet another codepath for WebKit, using yet again different non-standard stuff), making it hard for us to know what to do. (Do we try and copy the non-standard FF/WebKit stuff? They're trying to get rid of a lot of their non-standard stuffâ¦) Hopefully, sometime soon, this will change, and we'll be officially supported.