Browser news

The platform previews show the focus in IE9 on performance, interoperable HTML5 through same markup, and hardware acceleration. We’ve also posted here about the work we’ve done with add-on developers, and we shared some data about add-on performance and how we measure it.

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I recently demonstrated Test Driving Modern SVG using the SVG Dice sample currently on the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive site. While building this sample, I learned that both performance and interoperability for SVG are a subtle continuum and are not binary. Read more

When we first showed IE9 at the Professional Developers Conference last fall, we discussed how real world browser performance involves many different subsystems. Different websites use these subsystems in different ways, and to build a fast real world browser you have to start by understanding these overall patterns. This post provides an inside look at how these subsystems impact the performance of five real world websites. Read more

New week, and a new snapshot. :hat:

We have fixed the mail panel regression introduced with the previous snapshot, and improved on dialog modality on Mac. Read more

We have some sad news for the 0.1% of our users who are still on the PowerPC architecture.

Starting with the Next version of Opera, as of the next snapshot release (due sometime later today), we are discontinuing the PowerPC architecture on Mac and Linux. Opera 10.6x will be the last release with support for this architecture. Read more

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser, called “The Wilderness Downtown.” The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google.
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This week, Mozilla unveiled the newly redesigned Mozilla Developer Network, the latest incarnation of MDC. The website has evolved over the years and we recently decided to change the name from Mozilla Developer Center to the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) to better reflect the developer segments that make up our community and provide a better platform for engaging developers in the Mozilla mission and our plans for pushing the open Web forward. Read more

The first IE9 Platform Preview unveiled IE9’s initial support of SVG. As explained previously, SVG is a vector image format managed by the W3C. The release of the third and fourth Platform Previews come with feature-complete SVG. Major additions include support for SVG gradients, patterns, clipping, and masking. These features are often used to create images with depth and texture and are typically found in more complex SVG files. Read more

This article is about a new HTTPS header: Strict-Transport-Security, which force a website to be fetched through HTTPS. This feature will be part of Firefox 4.

How do you type URLs?

Do you prefix them with http:// or https:// systematically? Or do you just type example.com and let your browser add http://, like most of the people do?

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In just two years, the number of women on the mobile Web has risen 575%, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web Report, published today. South Africa leads the world’s push for gender equality on the mobile Web, with women accounting for nearly 44% of mobile web users. Read more

How do we decide whether to implement a feature that isn’t included in a standards specification? Like all browser providers, we often have to make this decision. In this post, I’ll use some real-world JavaScript examples to illustrate some of the principles we use to deliver an interoperable browser when the standards specification isn’t enough.

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A nice bunch of fixes coming right up! :)

We are now using the same build number on all platforms. Read more

The Telenor Group and Opera Software announce a non–exclusive Global Frame Agreement aiming to stimulate rapid growth of mobile Internet services across Telenor’s business units. Telenor’s business units can co-brand, distribute and run the Opera Mini mobile browser across its mobile handset and subscriber portfolios. As a result, Telenor’s customers in all geographies will be able to enjoy a fast, affordable and user-friendly mobile web experience on their favourite handset. Read more

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This is a guest post by Markus Stange. Markus usually works on the Firefox Mac theme implementation, but this time he went on a small side trip through the Gecko layout engine in order to implement -moz-element.

In Firefox Beta 4 we’re introducing a new extension to the CSS background-image property: the ability to draw arbitrary elements as backgrounds using -moz-element(#elementID).

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The latest Firefox 4 Beta has just been released (get it here). This beta comes with hundreds of bug fixes, Firefox Sync and Firefox Panorama. Read more

This is a re-post from Chris Pearce’s blog. To comply with the HTML5 specification, we replaced the autobuffer attribute with the tri-state preload attribute. We encourage you to update your code. See the documention on MDC.

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IE has traditionally drawn a 2-pixel border around the content area of a site. This border, drawn as part of the page rather than IE’s frame, affects calculations of distance from the top and left of the page. It also creates a not-so-modern beveled look.

In the fourth Platform Preview, you’ll notice pages running in IE9’s Standards Mode no longer have the border. Here’s a before and after:

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This is a repost from Chris Pearce’s blog.

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A few months ago, we launched several categories of featured Chrome extensions to help you find the right one. Read more

If you run Firefox Beta or Firefox nightlies, you will probably run into some issues. Reporting these bugs and crashes will help us to make sure the user experience is better for all Firefox 4 users.

Marcia Knous is part of the Firefox QA team. Because reporting a good bug is not that easy but extremely important, Marcia explains us how to file a bug correctly:

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