Changelog for Opera 9.0 Technology Preview 2 for UNIX

Information

• Download
• Build: 1635
• Released: February 7, 2006

Announcements

• Read more about the new features at Opera Labs
• My Opera Community forum
• Opera newsgroups (Google groups) or Opera newsgroups (news:// direct link)

Release Notes

• This is a preview version of Opera. Use only on properly backed up computers and do not install over previous Opera versions.
• Users may experience problems synchronizing mail with IMAP accounts. If this occurs, open the account settings and press OK to reset the connection. Then check your mail again.

Changes Since Opera 9.0 Technology Preview 1

User Interface

• New Opera Widgets feature. Widgets are small Web applications that live outside the Opera window. Press F6 to enter widgets mode. See the widgets 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 Newsfeeds

• New e-mail header toolbar.
• Improved IMAP folder synchronisation.
• 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 fieldsets.
• 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-align.
• 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.
• getAttribute now returns null for unspecified attributes that do not have a default value.
• 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 handing 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.

Plug-ins

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

Security

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

Miscellaneous

• Rewrote 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.

UNIX-specific changes

• Changes to plug-ins:
  • Removed the Motif dependency. Motif is no longer required to use plug-ins.
  • Improved plug-in detection.
  • Libdragonegg will not be loaded as a plug-in.
  • Correct Flash version is now reported to the server.
• Added automatic detection of libcups.so.2 to allow printing from systems that do not have cups development package installed.
• Opening downloaded and attached files now uses the system defined application, falling back to kfmclient in KDE and gnome-open in Gnome.
• Qt/KDE menu styles are enabled by default.
• Fixed mouse focus when performing gestures on pages containing plug-ins.
• Fixed text selection on multiple clicks.
• Improved handling of plug-ins that fail to respond to Opera.
• A native version for FreeBSD 6 is now available.
• LD_PRELOAD is now reset at startup. This change removes Java dependency for printing.
• $HOME is now set to /root if running Opera as root user, to prevent problems when running Opera through su.
• Files saved locally now use the default permissions of "-rw-r--r--".
• Known issues with widgets on Linux or UNIX:
  • Alpha transparency is not currently supported for widgets.
  • Widgets may be incorrectly positioned when dragged on slower computers. Use Alt+Drag instead.