Opera 10 RC Released

By | August 25, 2009 | 47 Comments

Opera 10 RC ReleasedAfter 3 beta releases, Opera 10 has finally reached release candidate development stage. Although this is not a final version yet, it should be quite stable and might be ready for general use.

Opera 10 Final is set for September 1st release.

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Vygantas is a former web designer whose projects are used by companies such as AMD, NVIDIA and departed Westood Studios. Being passionate about software, Vygantas began his journalism carrier back in 2007 when he founded FavBrowser.com. Having said that, he is also an adrenaline junkie who enjoys good books, fitness activities and Forex trading.

  • Niko

    It seems like they are rushing to cook Opera 10 final till Sep the 1st.

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      http://www.favbrowser.com/opera-10-release-dates-leaked/

      Opera 10 RC 1, August 2009
      Opera 10 Final, September 2009

      I wonder if those dates were actually correct and first 2 releases were wrong due to completely new skin (which was not originally planed).

      • Niko

        Who knows… But since they forked Opera NEXT to Opera 10 and Opera 10.10(unite included) maybe things go faster.

      • nobody

        it looks possible. ‘deadline driven development’ :/

      • NibLer

        @Vygantas Lipskas

        So instead of making the most logical conclusion, that the dates weren’t “leaked” at all, but that it was a fake, you now try to ignore all facts that don’t support that the “leak” was valid?

      • NibLer

        So instead of making the most logical conclusion, that the dates weren’t “leaked” at all, but that it was a fake, you now try to ignore all facts that don’t support that the “leak” was valid?

        If Opera did have this “deadline driven development”, wouldn’t they be 100% slaves to the “deadline” in the first place? Again “nobody”‘s flaming of Opera falls flat on its face.

        • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

          Don’t really understand your question.

          Somewhere I read that Opera 9.50 was also rushed for some sort of deadline.

          • somebody

            Yeah, I remember they released 9.50 in a hurry so that it would be released only a few days before the much hyped Firefox 3.0 .
            However, they seem to have learnt their lesson for 10. They have spent a lot of time polishing things and I have to say that version 10 without Unite is almost ready for showtime.

          • Thoe

            “they released 9.50 in a hurry so that it would be released only a few days before the much hyped Firefox 3.0″

            That’s not the way I remember it. Didn’t they say that they would have preferred NOT to compete with Firefox over the world’s attention at launch?

        • NibLer

          The “question” is more of a statement. You pull out those old dates even the list has been proven wrong.

          Yeah, I remember they released 9.50 in a hurry so that it would be released only a few days before the much hyped Firefox 3.0 .

          This is nonsense. They never rushed anything because of Firefox 3.0. Releasing at the same time as Firefos is what they would have wanted to avoid since Firefox would have stolen all the attention.

          Try to use a little bit of logic before making such silly claims.

      • NibLer

        Why is the comment form eating my comments?

        As I was saying, the facts clearly show that the list was wrong. Trying to retrofit the facts after it happened in order to make it look like it was right is just silly.

        And if Opera did have this “deadline driven development”, wouldn’t they be 100% slaves to the “deadline” in the first place? Again “nobody”‘s flaming of Opera falls flat on its face.

        That makes the ‘deadline driven development’ comment even more silly, as either they stick to all deadlines or they don’t.

    • NibLer

      BTW:

      It seems like they are rushing to cook Opera 10 final till Sep the 1st.

      Anyone who claims that Opera 10 is being “rushed” is certifiably insane. Opera 10 has been extremely stable, and they obviously set the date very recently based on the quality and what needed to be fixed before release.

  • nobody

    new icon, at least. funny tho, that they’ve kept it secret for so many months, when it is almost identical to the winGogi icon released year ago..

    nice to see next version, but opera problems persist:

    – dev tools suck, simple as that. they are the worst on the market now.
    – ‘infinite wait to load last element’
    – website compatibility (fanbois, please dont tell me that it is due to ‘free support for being netscape’ [loads of bs], or it is webdevelopers fault – yes, maybe, but look at the first point, and answer me ‘why webdevelopers should care if opera obviously doesnt?’
    – plugin compatibility – silverlight

    – no extension mechanisms – instead opera reinvented the web and did turbo link unite.. use widgets? hahaha

    – stubbornes when it comes to implementing standards ‘their own way’, why, opera, why you always choose your own path (that leads to noone careing) instead of a beaten one, that would give you that much needed 0.3% more marketshare?

    and for the final – that f..ing tray icon. it is the same offence as changing my desktop background.

    anyway, almost no core features, all that is added isnt a ‘browser’. and this is where opera lacks. oh, and in polishing old things. when will opera fix their cookie manager?

    • ERICHILTON

      GOD DUDE, if you think of it as THAT BAD go use ur little crappy firefox or something and stop saying all this bad stuff.. we love opera so shut up already!

      • nobody

        huh? say something constructive if you dare confront these facts :)

        when opera 10 was first introduced it promised revolution in compatibility (that didnt happen), webdev tools were to be the best in the world (and they are still unusable sh..), and their inventions were to change the world (unite certainly didnt yet). bag of empty promises and one good thing they did, is the skin, and that only because theyve hired a fresh blood. old one certainly failed..

        i think that opera’ management need fresh blood, too.

        • http://opera.com Daniel Hendrycks

          Hanging would take them a while to fix so they will asses that later.

          Tray icon bugs me also.
          New icon is a bit hard on the eyes. Reminds me of the error page from some build. (This is revised, but the background color is the same.) http://files.myopera.com/MetalRaise/albums/817774/Opera_10.00.1631_TerrorMessage.png

          “Extensions”
          +1, will explain why in a blog post when my blog is out of beta (it will be when I have more articles)

          But you can’t actually expect them to have done all those things, do you?

          They were working on Unite and doing major bug fixes. So they couldn’t work on every project they have going or else O10 would be in 2012. This is a very good improvement over 9.6!

          “when opera 10 was first introduced it promised revolution in compatibility”

          Could be 10.x, I have no idea how they are going to do that though.

          “webdev tools were to be the best in the world”
          When did they say that?

          • nobody

            “webdev tools were to be the best in the world”
            When did they say that?

            oh, on numerous ocassions advertising ragonfly and explaining why it is so bad at the start. unfortunatelly, the main issue with it is that it is a javascript bookmarklet, not something siting deeper in the core. it limits functionality. and js isnt a very good language when it comes to really hardcore debugging stuff.

            dragonfly is still COMPLETELY useless as a production tool. and people are shocked when MS doesnt want to support opera in office live? you know how much easier it is to use firebug? how many man-hours it saves?

            “Hanging would take them a while to fix so they will asses that later. ”

            problem is, that opera hangs on last elements for ages now. i think Opera devs simply do not believe, when users report that, because ‘it works here, you know’. when i started using opera 8.x it was already there!

            let me guess how much marketshare opera looses because of that bug (stat scripts not launching because pages are still not ‘loaded’..)

          • NibLer

            on numerous ocassions advertising ragonfly and explaining why it is so bad at the start.

            They didn’t explain “why it is so bad”, they explained that it takes time to do it properly. Just like Firebug has been refined for many years. It didn’t just magically pop into existence.

            unfortunatelly, the main issue with it is that it is a javascript bookmarklet, not something siting deeper in the core

            Yeah, exactly like Firebug then. Firebug is an extension. Basically JavaScript tying together some stuff. But I guess it’s only bad if Opera does it! :D

            let me guess how much marketshare opera looses because of that bug

            Considering that Opera’s desktop user base has doubled in less than 2 years, that’s a silly thing to say. Never mind the fact that even the useless Net Applications reports a growing market share for Opera over time.

          • Foo

            They didn’t explain “why it is so bad”, they explained that it takes time to do it properly. Just like Firebug has been refined for many years. It didn’t just magically pop into existence.

            Dragonfly was revealed to the public about a year and a half ago. This is what Firebug looked like after five months of development:
            http://www.joehewitt.com/blog/firebug_04_come.php

            Dragonfly is right now just about on par with what Firebug were after one month of development:
            http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2006/01/25/firebug-releases/

            Their latest update to Dragonfly seems to be back in February by the by, or November last year. It’s hard to tell with that strange “versioning” they’re using.
            http://dragonfly.opera.com/app/zips/

            Here’s some screenshots just to prove that I actually have Opera available for testing:
            http://bayimg.com/KaDdNaaCi

            http://bayimg.com/KADDpaacI

          • Thoe

            Dragonfly is right now just about on par with what Firebug were after one month of development

            That’s nonsense, of course. For example, Dragonfly has remote debugging.

            Their latest update to Dragonfly seems to be back in February by the by, or November last year. It’s hard to tell with that strange “versioning” they’re using.

            They have newer versions, but they need a new public version of Presto to release them.

            Dragonfly hasn’t been around for that long, and it took Firebug a LONG time to get to where it is now. Give it time.

          • Foo

            That’s nonsense, of course. For example, Dragonfly has remote debugging.

            Like I said, “just about”.

            They have newer versions, but they need a new public version of Presto to release them.

            Meh, they should be able to release pre/alpha/beta versions along with the pre/alpha/beta-builds for Opera. :P

            Dragonfly hasn’t been around for that long, and it took Firebug a LONG time to get to where it is now. Give it time.

            Except Firebug were useful and had proper logging functions and useful error messages and stack traces with links to relevant files after five months. After one and a half years Dragonfly has gone from “error in script with id34″ to “look at line 43 in the file error.js”. While I can agree that this is an improvement, it is far from what can be said to being actively worked on.
            Also, for some reason it refuses to show stack traces for me… I have set the setting opera:config#UserPrefs|Exceptions Have Stacktrace to true, but everytime I go there again it’s reset once more. This is with a factory default version of Opera mind you.

          • Thoe

            Except Firebug were useful and had proper logging functions and useful error messages and stack traces with links to relevant files after five months.

            Your rose-tinted glasses are deceiving you. It took a long time for Firebug to be really useful. Maybe it had some stuff you personally want, but that doesn’t mean that it was usable to everyone.

            it is far from what can be said to being actively worked on

            You know by now that it’s being actively worked on in preparation for a new Presto release, so why do you repeat this “it isn’t being actively worked on” nonsense?

          • Foo

            It took a long time for Firebug to be really useful. Maybe it had some stuff you personally want, but that doesn’t mean that it was usable to everyone.

            Five months is a long time. Firebug went from nothing to a usable debugger with logging functionality, stack traces and command line history, of course there’s more but that’s the first few things that came to mind. In contrast Dragonfly has achieved almost nothing since its release, just some minor cosmetic changes as it looks like.
            It took about a year of development for Firebug to get were it is today.
            http://web.archive.org/web/20061203051037/http://www.getfirebug.com/index.html

            You know by now that it’s being actively worked on in preparation for a new Presto release, so why do you repeat this “it isn’t being actively worked on” nonsense?

            Oh, sorry then I didn’t know you had access to insider information… and here I were thinking that they had at least one person dedicated to implementing proper debugging tools. I mean they did say, “we have big plans afoot for our developer tools and you can expect to see a lot of fantastic additions in coming months“, after all.
            None of the stuff I listed should require any back-end changes… For example there are links to the CSS files in the CSS pane, so not having it for error messages just seems strange. (Though, I do have this problem with Firebug too when it comes to CSS errors, not sure why he decided that not listing files for CSS errors were a good idea :-/)
            Also, they should be able to do something about that hideous UI without having to do any back-end changes…

          • Thoe

            In contrast Dragonfly has achieved almost nothing since its release

            This is nonsense, and you know it.

            Oh, sorry then I didn’t know you had access to insider information

            Um, they posted about it in the official blog.

          • Foo

            This is nonsense, and you know it.

            Trying to put words in my mouth… isn’t it time you try a new tactic? It’s getting old…

            Let’s take a look shall we.
            Changes since 06-02-2009:
            http://diff.pastebin.com/m18d53b25

            Looks pretty nice at first, but upon closer scanning you’ll see that it’s mostly added comments and reordering/cleanup that’s been done. That’s over a period of seven months, not what I would call having “big plans afoot for our developer tools” or “a lot of fantastic additions”.

            For those interested, two more diffs:
            Changes since 13-05-2009
            Changes since 08-06-2009

            I think this is sort of interesting also:
            (It basically shows how many lines have been altered, removed or added)
            $ grep ‘^[\+\-]‘ ’887 -> 1042 (No CSS).diff’ | wc -l
            4109
            $ grep ‘^[\+\-]‘ ’1042 -> 1100 (No CSS).diff’ | wc -l
            1538
            $ grep ‘^[\+\-]‘ ’1100 -> 1112 (No CSS).diff’ | wc -l
            227

            First one covers three months, February 2009 to May 2009.
            Second one covers one month, May 2009 to June 2009. By the by, Dragonfly were first released at the beginning of May 2008
            Third one covers the last three months, June 2009 to September 2009.

            Um, they posted about it in the official blog.

            The next release will be Opera Dragonfly alpha 4, which is under heavy development. This has been under development at the same time as alpha 3, as it requires new features found in the Scope module that is part of the upcoming Opera Presto 2.2 rendering engine. It will refine the user experience some what, as the currently active tab will be detected. This will tidy up the layout and make the docked mode much more logical to navigate. It will also introduce a HTTP inspector.

            Do you mean that?

            var ini =
            {
            // all files in http-clients must be updated to the cvs version of this file //
            protocol_version: ’4′,
            max_frames: 100,
            debug: false,
            dragonfly_version: ’0.7 alpha-4-snapshot’,
            revision_number: ’1112:17b1f8f6c3e7, protocol-4′,
            mercurial_revision: “”
            }

            That’s the data from scripts/ini.js in their latest zip. See the alpha 4 protocol_version: 4 parts?

            Perhaps I’m just over-expecting them ‘being open-source’ with this project…

            Dang, this must be the longest time I’ve spent on a post here… oh well, I learned about the diff command so all’s well!

        • NibLer

          when opera 10 was first introduced it promised revolution in compatibility

          Really? Where did they promise that? URL, please!

          Why would Opera promise a “revolution” when they know very well, as does anyone with even a tiny clue, that compatibility is insanely complex, and a lot of it is actually out of Opera’s hands.

    • NibLer

      stubbornes when it comes to implementing standards ‘their own way’, why, opera, why you always choose your own path

      There’s no stubbornness on Opera’s part. They are striving to be compatible with other browsers. Opera’s problem is that if they implement something, then another browser implements it differently, that other browser might be Firefox, and Mozilla can pretty much dictate how things should be implemented, and Opera has no choice but to follow suit. Which they do.

      So again, your claim of “stubbornness”, is nonsense.

      • g

        Why no ‘onContextMenu’ event support? It is everywhere but Opera.

        • NibLer

          If you are looking for something Opera is being “stubborn about”, onContextMenu is an extremely poor example:

          http://my.opera.com/hallvors/blog/show.dml/4172804#comment9727638

          Quote: “we actually want to implement it”

        • NibLer

          If onContexMenu is supposed to be proof of Opera’s “stubbornness”, that’s just laughable. It’s a technical issue, not a “stubbornness” issue:

          “now when serious web apps have started using it and we actually want to implement it, it turns out that a lot of code has evolved around the assumption that Opera is entirely in control of the right-click and menu, and it takes quite some work to get it right”

    • http://www.pneumatig.eu pneumatyka

      @nobody

      about Dragonfly:
      IMHO they already have made lots of improvements comparing to previous version. And do not forget that its still in alpha.

      Personally I’m using Dragonfly for simpler task now, and I must admit that locating some DOM node on complicated, heavy page works much faster (for me) than in FF.

      Lets wait for beta version

  • somebody

    I think overall Version 10 is a big improvement over 9.64, although most of the new features have been in other browsers for sometime. Well there are many features in Opera that other browsers are yet to copy, so i can forgive them for that.
    1. Customizable Speed dial
    2. Visual Tabs
    3. New Skin and New Icon
    4. Much better site compatibility
    5. Built in spell checker
    6. Auto Updates and built in crash reporting
    7. Opera Turbo
    8. Webmail Integration
    9. Re-sizable Search box
    10.Webfonts support and Acid3 support
    11.HTML mail support
    12.Faster rendering of pages

    I think they did a great job considering that they were falling back a lot compared to other browsers. Ofcourse , there are still a lot of areas where it can be improved, like nobody pointed out. But they did the best they could for this version. And they did a good thing by postponing Unite to the next version as it still needed a lot of work.
    By the way, I think Opera is now the best looking browser out there, if that counts for anything :) .

    • http://opera.com Daniel Hendrycks

      It’s great, they spend a lot more thime then FF does at bug fixes. It isn’t all about new features. A stable program is great.

  • Dels

    “stubbornes when it comes to implementing standards ‘their own way’, why, opera, why you always choose your own path (that leads to noone careing) instead of a beaten one, that would give you that much needed 0.3% more marketshare?” (Quoted from above comment)
    it’s actually marketshare on US market not for entire world, i mean in my country there are thousand (maybe million) opera user for both desktop and mobile/mini, and it said that our country use of opera has increased 400% in 2008
    in global market they currently have 10 millions user (or even more), and the largest fans was on Rusia and Europe countries

    PS: sorry for my english

    • NibLer

      Opera actually reported having 40 million desktop users several months ago. It’s probably more than 50 million now. Opera’s global market share is around 3%. And 7-8% in Europe.

  • NibLer

    Why is the comment form eating my comments?

    • http://www.favbrowser.com Vygantas Lipskas

      It’s related to anti spam plugin, if it notices that something very similar was already posted by same username, marks message as spam.

  • http://www.pneumatig.eu pneumatyka

    There is still much to do for opera developers, remember javascript compatibility tables from quirksmode? like this: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/events/index.html

    Seems like opera is least compatible browser (with others).

    IMHO stability, and general polishing, and adding some common-user features (like spell check etc) was a good decision (lack of html email, or spellcheck was a pain for average joe).
    Those javascript incompatibilities will be gone with Carakan I guess, HTML5 and css3 features will be gone with Vega and Presto 2.3.

    And UNITE is AWSOME :D

    • NibLer

      There is still much to do for opera developers, remember javascript compatibility tables from quirksmode? like this: http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/events/index.html

      That’s just the DOM EVENTS table. And BTW, it supports about as much as other browsers.

      Those javascript incompatibilities will be gone with Carakan I guess

      What JavaScript incompatibilities? There are no major compatibility problems with Opera today. It may have JS bugs like all browsers, but that’s just a tiny part of the picture.

      Carakan isn’t going to magically fix all those sites using browser sniffing and stuff like that.

      • g

        This is +THE MOST+ important compatiblity comparison page when it comes to javascript. If you don’t understand it, then you are completely worthless in technical discussions, so don’t participate in them please, you are lowering the standards.

        If opera can’t “see” and event, or handles it poorly, webapps break. And oh boy they do frequently. You can’t see why? So it is all ‘browser sniffing’s fault’? No, opera has a fair share of it itself.

        And the most astonishing thing? there is NO improvement between 9,6 and 10 branches. THIS is a clear sign, that website compatibility is to be solved by whining, not by hard work. What is next Opera, ask European Commission to ban onCopy events because all others use them?

        • Thoe

          “This is +THE MOST+ important compatiblity comparison page when it comes to javascript.”

          This is DOM, and just a part of it.

          And if you notice, no browser can “see” all DOM events, so clearly you are biased against Opera and inventing things.

          “THIS is a clear sign, that website compatibility is to be solved by whining, not by hard work.”

          Yeah, let’s ignore all the other major changes and improvements and continue whining about the fact that Microsoft was forced to face the consequences of its illegal actions.

          Never mind the fact that both Google and Mozilla joined the complaint as well… Hypocrite.

          • g

            As I’ve said, you clearly have no clue about this topic, so please stop making fool out of you.

            “Have you actually read the Opera blogs about how they handle compatibility? No? They have several people working exclusively on that. Several teams, in fact, I think.”

            Many of these (mostly failed) attempts wouldnt be necessary if Opera implemented some ‘industry standard’ stuff in the same manner as other players. But no, they’ve chosen their own way. And there is a price. Wasting money on people that try to fix webpages one by one, instead of fixing the core. Just like with oncontextmenu, they cant fix the core quickly, and have to spend lots of money on emails begging developers to ‘consider applying this fix’ or makin browser.js fixes. You like to start flames and abuse other people, that shows clearly about your absolute worthless statue in real world. Go away.

          • Thoe

            Many of these (mostly failed) attempts wouldnt be necessary if Opera implemented some ‘industry standard’ stuff in the same manner as other players. But no, they’ve chosen their own way.

            You have failed to demonstrate this. Opera implents things the same way as other browsers. It’s just that “other browsers” (Firefox) often implement something their own way after Opera has already implemented it in one way, so Opera needs to change even though it actually did it before Firefox. Just because Firefox has such a large user base.

            Wasting money on people that try to fix webpages one by one, instead of fixing the core.

            See, there’s your problem. You can’t fix everything by fixing the core. Things like browser sniffing, etc. require other ways to fix it. And other things can’t be fixed in the core because other browsers are moving in a different direction, so all Opera can do is to patch sites temporarily until they start following where browsers are going.

            Just like with oncontextmenu, they cant fix the core quickly

            Some things can be fixed quickly, others can’t. Your sweeping generalizations prove your lack of knowledge.

            You like to start flames and abuse other people, that shows clearly about your absolute worthless statue in real world.

            What is a “worthless statue”? :D

          • Thoe

            Also, what makes you think site patching is all these people are doing. They obviously have people working on the CORE fixing bugs.

            But never mind. I have been trolled.

        • Thoe

          By the way, this is a blatant lie from a troll:

          “website compatibility is to be solved by whining, not by hard work”

          Have you actually read the Opera blogs about how they handle compatibility? No? They have several people working exclusively on that. Several teams, in fact, I think.

          But hey, keep whining like the little crybaby that you are.

      • http://www.pneumatig.eu pneumatyka

        DOMEvents are less important.

        VERY IMPORTANT onContextMenu event missing web apps require this.
        All Text Manipulation events are missing – copy, paste, cut
        Also basic events – onFocus, onBlur, onChange, onKeyDown, onKeyPress does not work the same as in other browsers, so they can cause problems.
        Not to mention onError event handling.

        And I expect Carakan, as a new Javascript engine, besides doing all this advanced speed&memory stuff will implement those events just because its worth to be compatible (even if its not a standard).

        • Thoe

          onContextMenu isn’t very important. onFocus, etc. do work mostly the same as other browsers (although other browsers behave differently from EACH OTHER again, so it depends on your perspective).

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