This article was written on August 15, 2007 by CyberNet.
Opera 9.23 has been released and is ready for consumption by the general public. A majority of the things fixed in this release are credited to Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool that was released at Black Hat about two-weeks ago. The tool found four bugs in Opera that caused crashes, and one "highly severe" security vulnerability:
Fixed four crash bugs found using Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool.
Fixed a stability issue with Speed Dial.
Fixed a critical JavaScript security issue discovered with Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool: "A virtual function call on an invalid pointer that may reference data crafted by the attacker can be used to execute arbitrary code."
Windows Vista Only: Scrolling problem with some Microsoft mice fixed.
I’m happy that Mozilla was kind enough to release the tool for everyone to use, and I’m extremely happy that people are actually using it! As I stated last time, jsfunfuzz has caught an astonishing 280 bugs in Firefox’s JavaScript engine, and more than two-thirds of those have already been fixed. Thanks to jsfunfuzz, and the creator Jesse Ruderman, the Web has just gotten a little safer.
Now I’m hoping to see test builds of Opera 9.5 soon, and from the looks of it the Opera Desktop Team isn’t taking kindly to comments regarding future versions of the browser. Almost all comments that mention Opera 9.5 are said to be off-topic, and are consequently being removed. I’m sure it is getting annoying for them when every other comment is along the lines of "can’t wait for 9.5," but that is just their community getting excited for the release. Now commenters are referring to it as "The-Build-Which-Should-Not-Be-Named," or TBWSNBN for short. I understand why it is being done, but I was pretty disappointed when I saw my comment get removed as well.
This article was written on May 09, 2008 by CyberNet.
Win; Mac; Linux Opera is obviously not content with sitting on the sidelines when it comes to being the fastest browser out there. Back in February Mozilla decided that it was time to optimize it’s JavaScript performance, and used a technique called Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that gave it a nice boost. Opera decided to jump on the PGO bandwagon as well with this week’s release of Opera 9.5, and here is their explanation of how it works:
With this technique, Opera is compiled twice. The first compilation creates a specially instrumented build that gathers statistics about which code is called and which variables are used most often. The instrumented build loads sites automatically using “URL player”, a testing feature available in every Opera build (more information about that in a later blog post). This information is dumped into files and used to produce the final build that’s optimized based on the gathered statistics.
Did it help? Unfortunately there are some bugs in Opera 9.5 that prevent it from finishing the Sunspider test, but in the areas it does complete the result is normally better than Firefox 3 Beta 5. It does, however, consistently beat Firefox 3 in the MooTools SlickSpeed test in addition to this JavaScript benchmarking tool.
Congrats Opera! It looks as though you might be recapturing the JavaScript performance crown, but we’ll have to wait and see what the final version of each browser is like before we make any conclusions along those lines.
As promised, the boys and girls at Opera have pushed out an Android-flavored beta version of their Opera Mobile 10.1 product today — and considering the company’s track record for making awesome replacement browsers, odds are good that you’re going to want to check it out. Besides pinch-to-zoom and support for location services, you’ll find fan favorites like desktop browser sync and Opera’s Speed Dial, a touchable grid of bookmarks. What’s more, the visual tab management is downright slick (then again, outdoing the tab management in-built to Android doesn’t take much), so you might want to take it for a test drive today — can we suggest engadget.com as a fine starting point? The app’s available from the Android Market right now; follow the break for the press release and an official demo of pinch-to-zoom in action. Or, you know, just download it and do some pinch-to-zooming of your own. Your call.
The World Wide Web Consortium — you know, the team responsible for certifying and standardizing HTML5 — has put together its first table of official conformance test results, giving us an idea of how well prepared each of the most popular browsers is for the oncoming web standards revolution. The data show Internet Explorer 9 as the most adroit performer (again), though Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Safari don’t seem to be too far behind in their HTML5 compliance, either. Of course, these checks don’t cover the entire spec, which in itself isn’t even finalized yet, but they provide us with a glimpse into a brave new world where Microsoft actually cares about coders keen on maximizing interoperability by adhering to web-wide standards. Good stuff. Check out the full results at the source link below.
It’s no surprise that Opera 9.5 can synchronize your bookmarks with an online server, and can therefore give you access to them anywhere when running Opera 9.5! That is one of Opera 9.5′s most notable features, and the development team just stepped up their game by launching what’s called Opera Link.
With Opera Link you can access your bookmarks and Speed Dial entries from wherever you are via the link.opera.com site. Once logged in you should see an interface similar to that above, where you can add or remove bookmarks. You can’t move bookmarks between folders, or rearrange the folders for that matter, but that might be something they will work on in the future.
From the Opera Link site you can also view all of your Speed Dial entries, and it appears that they will eventually show small thumbnails of each. Right now I just get a “No screenshot available” message for each of my Speed Dial bookmarks.
And Opera didn’t stop there. They realize how popular their Opera Mini browser is becoming, and so they thought that it would be even more convenient if people could manage their bookmarks with that! Hence you can use Opera Mini 4 Beta to synchronize your bookmarks as well.
Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s CEO, said:
We refuse to believe people should compromise their experience when they access the Web from different devices. With Opera Link, we give them a consistent experience uniquely suited to the way they want to use the Web. But as cool as we think Opera Link is now, we are already hard at work making it even more valuable to our users in the future. Opera Link means convergence without compromise.
I think the only thing that Opera Link is missing right now is direct support for the Nintendo Wii browser, and I’m not sure if they have plans to integrate it with that in the future. I’m just grateful for the multiple methods they’ve already implemented with Opera Link.
This article was written on September 16, 2007 by CyberNet.
One of the new features that Opera 9.2 introduced is called Speed Dial. It’s essentially like a customizable homepage except that this takes screenshots of websites, and then places a thumbnail of them aligned to a grid for easy access.
You can currently add up to nine sites, and each Speed Dial entry is mapped to the corresponding Ctrl+[1-9] hotkeys. The Speed Dial page is also displayed each time you open a new tab, and for that reason I agree with the Opera community when they say there should be more than 9 Speed Dial entries.
One of the cool things in Speed Dial is the ability to set an automatic reload interval (pictured above). This makes it easy to see when changes have occurred to any of your Speed Dial entries.
Naturally you will want to add the sites you visit the most to your Speed Dial, and when you have such a frugal amount of entries available it can be tough to decide what makes the cut. Well, today I’m here to make it even tougher by showing you some of the useful things you can add to your Speed Dial!
Traffic graphs – Who ever said that the pages in your Speed Dial had to be websites? You can also add images to it which are pleasantly scaled down, and website owners may find it beneficial to keep a traffic chart as one of the entries (like this one for Alexa).
Weather radar – Most weather sites offer radar images for regions around the world, and all you need to do is grab the address of the image associated with a radar image. I’ve got the AccuWeather Iowa radar image refreshing every 5-minutes, and it’s nice being able to take a quick glance each time I open a new tab to see if any big storms are coming our way!
Cron job – I’ve got a task that I want to run on a remote server only when my laptop is turned on, which happens to be the entire day expect when I sleep. So I setup the script to get executed through some PHP on a website, and if the script is successful in its task it outputs a solid green page. If it fails the page is red and provides the reason it failed. By using Speed Dial I can quickly change the interval at which the script runs, and it’s always easy to make sure things went smoothly: This can also be used for doing things like pinging FeedBurner on a regular schedule by using this URL: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http://DOMAIN.COM where DOMAIN.COM is your site’s address.
Email monitor – Speed Dial is obviously great for watching for changes to sites, and I use it all the time to see if there are any new emails before I actually pull up my email account.
Stock watcher – With a site such as StockCharts.com you can create a highly customized graph to monitor some of your investments! Just copy the image address into your Speed Dial, set the refresh interval, and you’re all set.
As you can tell I really love Speed Dial, but there are also some things that Opera can do to improve it:
Customize how many entries could be added. It would especially be cool if you could create multiple "pages" of Speed Dial entries and organize them into tabs!
Add multiple search engines to the Speed Dial page
Get notified when a page has changed
The thumbnails should be scaled to fit the width or height of the Speed Dial box. If you try inserting an image that is about 100px wide it still gets scaled down to about 25px, despite it being able to fit in the Speed Dial box without resizing it.
So, you’d love to get the movies, music, and photos from your laptop to your living room, but you don’t want to buy another box, right? Well, If you have a game console, you’re in luck. ZOMG IT’S SOOOO EASY. More »
This article was written on April 21, 2008 by CyberNet.
The number of phishing attempts continues to grow each year and really has gotten out of hand. In fact, Wikipedia says that about 100 billion spam messages (as of June 2007) are sent each and every single day. To put this into perspective, that accounts for about 80-85% of all incoming messages that a user receives in a days time. As the number continues to grow, more and more preventative measures are being put in place to help keep people from becoming victims of the phishing attempts. Most of us these days can rely on web browsers like Firefox and Opera to help alert us when needed, but sites like Google are also getting in and finding ways to protect their users.
One of the many ways Google is helping to protect their users is a new phishing warning that shows up if someone attempts to visit a site that is used for phishing by clicking on a link in the search results. The warning you’d receive (image from Google Operating System) tells you that they suspect web forgery and that the user should return to the results page and pick a new result.
While this is another nice extra layer of protection, our only question is why Google would even display a phishing site in the results if they already knew that it was a problem?
Choice is a good thing, and Android users certainly have a lot of choices. Default launcher or Launcher Pro? Fancy animated live wallpaper or static picture of adorable puppies? Stock browser or alternative? It’s that last question that has plagued so many, and to offer some guidance PC World pitted six of the Market’s top choices against each other. The 2.1 and 2.2 stock browsers entered, along with Skyfire 2.0, Opera Mini, Dolphin HD, and Mozilla Fennec (the pre-beta release of what could bring Firefox to your phone). The winner? Well, you can see the ultimate speed results above, with SkyFire surprisingly trumping Opera Mini, though that one seemingly has ’em beat when it comes to repeat-visits. However, the full story when it comes to things like page rendering and Flash compatibility is naturally a good bit more complex. For those details you’ll need to click on through.
This article was written on September 03, 2007 by CyberNet.
CyberNet Exclusive Look
We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps. The Opera Desktop Team wrote a post last week that detailed some of the under-the-hood work that has been going on in 9.5, but as expected, they steered clear of mentioning the most notable features. After all, they want to save the excitement for the big Alpha release tomorrow!
Luckily I was able to test drive Opera 9.5 a little bit early, and it’s only fair that I share my findings with you (and we have Opera’s permission of course). I’ve put together a 5-minute video review that details four of what I believe to be Kestrel’s most notable features. So you can start out by watching the video, or you can read through the article as I cover each feature there as well.
–Video Introduction–
I thought it would be best if I start with a video of Opera 9.5’s new features. All of these are covered in detail below, but this will give you a really good idea of what you can expect tomorrow when Opera 9.5 Alpha is released.
–Rendering Engine–
It’s been over a year since Opera’s rendering engine has seen any significant improvements, and this time around there are some significant improvements. Kestrel is now running the same rendering engine that powers the Wii Internet Channel browser as well as Opera Mini 4 Beta, and there are some astonishing differences…probably due to the thousands of bugs they’ve fixed.
I’ve been told to expect to see the rendering speed get better as further builds get released, but I have a hard time believing that they can get better than what I’ve seen. I decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:
Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
Firefox 2: 15 seconds
Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds
Aside from speed improvements, the site compatibility has also gotten much better. They’ve fixed problems with various Google sites, some issues with the default WordPress template, and corrected a few things with some of the JavaScript libraries. Opera 9.5 can now handle many more sites…with ease!
Here are some of the other updates in Kestrel related to the rendering engine:
A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
AJAX compatibility has been improved
New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
Improved HTML table layout algorithm
–Open With… (in the video)–
Despite all of the hurdles Opera has overcome with their new rendering engine, there are still some sites that probably won’t work as they should. Opera isn’t going to deny that it happens, and they are actually going to do what they can to help the situation. You can now right-click on any site and choose to open it in another browser that is installed on your computer!
I’ve also been told that the “open with” command will work with some files as well, but complete support hasn’t been added yet. I would like to see this feature extended to things like images so that I can right-click on an image and have it open in Paint.NET without needing to save it first.
–Restore Windows (in the video)–
Opera has a little trash can on the Tab Bar that is normally used to restore tabs you’ve recently closed (which can also be done with Ctrl+Z). Kestrel has introduced a new feature that will let you restore entire windows that you have closed, which includes all of the tabs contained within that window. I don’t open multiple windows very often, but I know this feature will come in handy.
–Sync Bookmarks (in the video)–
This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you’ll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You’ll then be able to access that data whether you’re at work, home, or anywhere!
To setup synchronization just select the “Synchronize with My Opera” option from the File Menu.
–Full History Search (in the video)–
The search capabilities in Opera 9.23 vs. Opera 9.5 are like night and day. They have now introduced full history search that looks back over all of the pages you’ve visited. I’m not talking about just scanning the URL and title of the page either…it looks at all the text contained within each site!
There are two ways that you can take advantage of this feature, and the most common one will be straight from the address bar. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was typing in “thumb” into the address bar, and the resulting page that was returned is our homepage. That’s because I had recently visited CyberNet where “Thumbnails” was one of the words used, but it wasn’t in the title or the URL, it was just in the body of the article.
If you’re looking for a more detailed way to search your entire history, just type opera:historysearch into the address bar. The result will be a Google-like search page where you can type the keyword(s) that you are looking for. It will then return the results that matched just like in this screenshot:
–What You Don’t See–
It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
Of course Opera still starts almost instantaneously, which is one of its best qualities. And memory usage has (somehow) gotten better. I’ve never seen Opera 9.2 climb over the 250MB marker, and that was when I would have 50 to 100 tabs open at the same time (hey, I go through a lot of news in a days time). Now it seems to run at about 80% of the memory usage that it used to, and for most people it will hover between 25MB and 70MB.
–And There’s More!–
I’ve covered most of the big stuff above, but that’s not everything! Here’s a list of some other things that have been improved in Opera 9.5:
The Status Bar is enabled by default…yay!
The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it. That way you can verify that the username and password you entered works before actually saving it. What a great feature!
Content blocking is better
A “drag to scroll” feature has been added that will let you scroll by “grabbing” the page, much like in a PDF reader. You can enable it by typing opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan into the address bar.
It supposedly looks better on a Mac, and conforms to the Apple Human Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac to try that out on.
–Making it Better–
There are some things that I believe Opera can do to make the final product even better, but one of the most important is inline spell checking. This is often the first complaint I hear from existing Firefox users who try Opera, and I think it is an extremely useful feature.
–Overview–
There’s no doubt in my mind that Opera 9.5 is going to be a truly amazing browser once it is released, and it will likely raise the bar for other browsers. However, the build being released tomorrow is an Alpha, and it will have issues at first. There might be sites that don’t work properly with it, and if you decide to try this out, make sure to install it in a separate location from your stable Opera installation.
For more details on some of the backend work done to Kestrel, read this article posted by the Opera Desktop Team.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
Opera 9.23 has been released and is ready for consumption by the general public. A majority of the things fixed in this release are credited to Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool that was released at Black Hat about two-weeks ago. The tool found four bugs in Opera that caused crashes, and one "highly severe" security vulnerability:
I understand why it is being done, but I was pretty disappointed when I saw my comment get removed as well.
Win; 
Mac; 
Linux
One of the new features that 
It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.
