The year of the Opera?
The recent spur of Opera releases has shown that the (little?) company from Norway has been keen on listening to its users. Will this be the year that Opera can take a market share of up to 2%?
Last year there was a big discussion and eventually a separation between the main Mozilla Thunderbird developers, because the Mozilla Corporation wanted to focus less on mail and more on the web, in the form of Firefox. Opera Software however seems to have taken a different route. While Opera Mail (M2) has been lacking updates for end users (back-end changes were there), Kestrel and Peregrine have shown renewed focus in this area. With handy features as low bandwidth mode, following threads, remove mail from server (in X days) and most recently HTML composing of mail messages. E-mail is still is an important part of our online lives and certainly not everyone uses webmail only yet. With few real and free alternatives out there Opera Mail as part of Opera 10 can surely make people who e-mail regularly (offline) switch, even if they don't use the browser part (right away).
On the browser side lots of requested features have been realized; in-line spell check (also available in Mail), auto-update system (no more manual work), support for web fonts, and continued work on evolving Dragonfly . Currently there are only a few features left that make other browsers stand-out feature wise. Yes, Opera stands-out in the total picture with lots more features, but these have received most of the press attention: extensions support (Firefox has it, Chrome will get it, but both are more bare bone browsers), privacy mode (without destroying your cache/history), color profile support (Safari has it, Firefox 3.1 will have it, which is very very nice for the increasingly more popular art of picture taking, as well as improved color support in Windows Vista and calibration in Windows 7), and a super fast JavaScript engine (TraceMonkey, SquirrelFish Extreme, V8).
As you can see these features aren't mind blowing as Opera Software already realized several key features just for Opera 10. The biggest dangers in upcoming reviews this year will be the privacy mode and performance. Opera has long been known as being fast, but currently Chrome, Firefox 3.1, and Safari still the performance crowns from one another. However we should be realistic, you can't do everything in one release and still have short development cycles. Perhaps similar to the 9.x series we'll see 10 followed by 10.5 with more features added.
Of course Opera Software is most known for doing its own innovations, so who knows what will make it into Opera 10 before the final release (a new logo, a new icon, a new look?). Keep it up vikings, you're doing great!
At the end of 2008, I met up with some people from Opera, so I got some inside scoop on some of the features that will come out with Peregrine.
A new look was definitely a top priority, so I'm really anxious to see what they come up with.
On Javascript performance: Presto 2.1 is really, really fast. It's also all that faster considering Opera supports both ECMA standard scripting as well as IE style scripting. And on top of that, new features and api`s are made available to developers. Then there's another thing: the margin by which Chrome and Safari and Firefox (I'm talking about the upcoming releases of those browsers) beat Opera's scripting engine are so small when it comes to real-life apps and websites that they don't really matter.
Opera will gain ground through what it has always provided: killer features. Paste and go, mouse gestures, integrated email client, small screen rendering, superb standards support, intelligent context menus, etc. It's those features that get users hooked on Opera.
Thanks for the little peek in the kitchen of Opera.
An API for developers that's interesting. We may see that during the beta phase of Opera 10 which will focus on features. One of the regulars at the Opera forums (rseiler?) noticed a new folder in the profile folder called jsplugins that may be a related.
With regard to Javascript speed; benchmarks don't necessarily represent every day situations. You mention performance differences being small in real life applications the same like Opera does. I have always wondered what those real life apps were. May be you can tell us more? Opera tends to be closed about things.
I love Opera so I am always curious to learn something new about what is cooking.
Post new comment