Software update: Opera 9 technology preview 2

Opera is a free-to-use internet browser with features such as tabbed browsing, a pop-up blocker, and an email program with a spam filter. Today the developers of Opera released the second technology preview of version 9 made available. In this preview you can test the new possibilities of the browser. For example, TP2 includes Wigets with AJAX functionality (Asynchronous Javascript and XML – more information can be found this Wikipedia article), files can be shared via the built-in BitTorrent client and specific content can be banned via the content blocker. Opera 9 Technology Preview 2 can be used on Windows, Linux and Unix-like operating systems and finally Mac OS X. Below are the release notes of Technology Preview 2 posted:

User interface

• New Opera Widgets feature. Widgets are small Web applications that live outside the Opera window. Press F6 to enter widget mode. See the widget tutorials for more details.
• Added content blocking feature. Right click on a page and select “Block content”, then click on content that you want to block. Alternatively, use Tools > Advanced > Content blocked to manage blocked content.
• Added search shortcut editor. Right click on a form input to add it as a search shortcut, or use Preferences > Search to manage search shortcuts
• Enabled support for BitTorrent.
  • New search shortcut ‘b’ searches BitTorrent
• Added site specific preferences user interface.
  • Press F12 and choose Site preferences to set preferences for the current site, or use Preferences > Advanced > Sites to manage site specific preferences.
  • Preferences that can be set on a per-site basis can now be accessed using Preferences > Advanced > Sites > Default settings.
• Web page thumbnails are now shown when hovering tabs.
  • Thumbnails are also available when switching tabs using Ctrl+Tab. These are disabled by default but can be enabled using the [User Prefs] Use Thumbnails in Window Cycle setting in opera:config.
• Added grouping by date and site to the History panel.
• Added syntax highlighting to source viewer.
• CSS errors are now reported to the message console.
• Tabbed browsing mode now opens a new tab if all existing tabs are closed.
• Local stylesheets can now be specified as a directory using the [User Prefs] Local CSS Files Directory setting, and all stylesheets in that directory will be used to populate the on-demand user stylesheet menu.
• New styles for opera:about, opera:cache, opera:config, opera:error, opera:history, opera:plugins, file: view, and Info panel.
• opera:config says what changes were saved.
• opera:config now allows linking to individual preferences, and searching within headers.
• Simplified bookmarks and Wand dialogs.
• Added keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Enter to auto complete “www” and “com” when used in the address field.
• Ctrl+B can be used instead of Ctrl+Shift+V for paste-and-go.

Messaging and News Feeds

• New email header toolbar.
• Improved IMAP folder synchronization.
• Improved moving of email between IMAP folders.
• Fix for duplicates showing in IMAP sent view.
• Fix for messages showing blank
• Added support for importing and exporting feed lists in OPML format, using File > Import and export.
• Default mail views can no longer be renamed through the mail interface. They can be renamed using language packs.
• Added a warning when sending mail without a subject.
• User stylesheets are no longer applied to mail, news, and chat.
• Added smiley menu to chat and mail toolbars.
• Added CTCP flood protection to IRC chat.

display

• Added support for CSS 3 opacity.
• Media queries now understand several CSS length units, and can check additional media features.
• CSS rules that are only partially correct (for example, ‘1px solid notrecognised’) are now ignored.
• Printing now uses backgrounds from print media instead of screen.
• Text decoration is retained on absolutely positioned links.
• Attribute selectors now use the specified value of URIs, instead of resolved values.
• Button elements now respect display:none.
• Multiple fixes for styling of legends and field sets.
• Allowed coloring of text and backgrounds in option and optgroup elements.
• Fixed a regression with CSS attribute selectors failing to understand percentages.
• Improved handling of tables in ERA.
• Improvements for BIDI, including handling of padding-right, align=”justify”, and alignment in ERA.
• Improved handling of vertical alignment.
• Improved handling of CSS 3 UI element states pseudo-classes.
• The align attribute will now apply to TR, TBODY, THEAD and TFOOT as well. Block-alignment will not be inherited from table or inline-table.
• @import is now supported in user stylesheets.
• Fixed handling of alternate stylesheets in XML.
• Added support for -o-text-overflow:ellipsis, synonymous to text-overflow:ellipsis in the current CSS 3 working draft.
• Updated display:inline handling on tables according to upcoming CSS2.1 specification update.

Changes to defaults

• Anonymous table cells in a display:table; now have a default vertical-align:middle;
• Form default margin-top is now 0, and margin-bottom now 1em.
• Several changes to the default margin and padding of legends and fieldsets.

Script

• getAttribute and related methods now retrieve the specified value of URIs, instead of resolved values.
• Improved DOM error reporting.
• Multiple fixes for XPath and XSLT.
• Fix to prevent reprocessing of scripts when a script element is moved through DOM.
• Enabled getElementById to retrieve elements based on attributes set to the ID type, by the DTD.
• Improved handling of the load event when navigating back and forward through history. See the knowledge base article for more details.
• Improved redrawing of table rows when dynamically changing styles.
• Added Node.text property, equivalent to Node.textContent
• Added support for the Element.currentStyle property.
• Canvas:
  • Fix for rect() and fill().
  • Added support for standard CSS color styles such as rgb() and color keywords.
  • Improved handling of resizing the canvas.
  • display:none on images in HTML no longer causes those images to fail to draw in canvas.
  • Many path() fixes.

forms

• Fix for selecting text with different sized fonts in rich text editing.
• Added support for inserthtml, contentreadonly, increasefontsize, and decreasefontsize in rich text editing.
• Rich text editing now allows selection of images.
• XHTML forms are no longer submitted if they do not have an action attribute.
• Added support for the datetime input type.
• Fix to allow inputs to have a large maxlength value.
• Improved keyboard accessibility of Web Forms inputs.
• Enabled the htmlTemplate property.
• Added support for the datalist element and list attribute.
• Added support for Web Forms 2.0 step=”any”.
• Added support for oninput and onforminput events.
• Removed support for maxlength on file inputs (this section of Web Forms 2.0 has also been changed).
• Added support for Web Forms 2.0 repetition.

Images

• Added support for YCCK and CMYK formats in JPEG images.
• Multiple improvements to SVG 1.1 basic and SVG DOM support.

Plugins

• Initial implementation of NPP_GetValue().
• Re-enabled scripting or plug-ins with Java using LiveConnect.

Security

• Updated expired TrustCenter root certificates.
• Fixed a TLS Extension format error.
• Security bar is now greyed out for sites using an encrypted connection, that have a low security rating.

Miscellaneous

• Reroot server push handling.
• Fixed handling of target=”_top” and target=”_parent”.
• Removed support for the Content-Location HTTP header as a base HREF.
• Site patching can now download certain site specific preferences as well as Browser JavaScript and user agent overrides.
• Multiple stability fixes.

Windows specific changes

• Added experimental support for NTLM authentication.
• Fix for importing Internet Explorer favorites.
• When first run, Opera will attempt to import bookmarks from the default browser. Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Opera are supported.
• Known issues with widgets on Windows 95, 98, ME and NT:
  • Widgets may fail to render correctly.