CodeDread Blog » Opera

Priceless

Jeff — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 01:29:29 +0000

This evening on “As The Twitter Spews”:

Opera’s “Web Opener” (and newest Interest Group member) makes a request
Internet Explorer’s Head Honcho gets a little huffy
Snarkiness

BTW, if you’re not on Twitter yet, you are missing out. For instance, I find this feed useful.

SVG Web Stats 2.0

Jeff — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 06:36:49 +0000

I’ve made enough updates over the past week or so on my SVG Web Stats thing to call it 2.0. Here are a list of changes:

Added ability to dynamically filter out browsers you don’t want to see in the graph (uncheck it in the legend)
Added points of interest on the graph (hover to get a tooltip, click to view the associated link
Aggregated my data to the weekly level (to smooth weekend dips out)
Added some animation to the user interface
Added tooltips to the data series for browser identification (works only in Firefox and Opera)
Collapsed some older browsers so that the graph are more distinguishable.

Drag and scrollbar performance are blazingly fast in WebKit nightlies on my machine. Just how I imagined it when I first wrote this over two years ago. Opera 9.5, Firefox 3 and Safari 3.1 performance are not bad at all. It doesn’t perform well in Firefox 2.

I just noticed that the tooltips are broken in WebKit nightlies…

Note that the legend suffers from what I consider to be a bug in Opera and Webkit nightlies. In these browsers, the legend is ‘jittery’ when the mouse hits the checkboxes. Firefox and Safari do not have this behavior because I’m using FakeSmile, a JS implementation of SMIL. It seems to me like either mouseout events are firing when they shouldn’t or the animation wants to start over at its original value instead of where it is currently. I’m hoping some Opera SMIL guru can stop by.

If you missed the link above, click here to see the demo. I’d be curious to know if it works at all in Internet Explorer with Adobe SVG Viewer. I know it doesn’t work in IE+Renesis.

Webkit Nightly: Not Smiling

Jeff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 05:08:05 +0000

After the announcement that the Apple developers have turned on their SMIL support in order to pass Acid3 test, I was excited enough to download the MacOS nightly and run through the SVG animation test suite. I was pretty disappointed.

Out of 58 tests involving animation, WebKit r31344 fails 54, gets 3 of the tests partially right and only gets 1 test to completely pass. To put this into ‘acid’ terms, this means that WebKit r31344 gets a score of 5/116 when it comes to SVG animation support (as compared to Opera 9.5′s 110/116). See my top-secret scoring mechanism here.

My concern at this point is that releasing such a nonconforming SMIL implementation into the wild will just frustrate authors and users. But I suppose there isn’t much SMIL out there at the moment. Here’s one data point, at least: My menus no longer animate properly in WebKit r31344, producing ‘fluttering’ icons… Is there a way I can turn off WebKit’s native SMIL when visiting my website? Does anyone know of any other sites out there using SMIL in their UI?

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to future Webkit releases that will improve upon the SMIL implementation – and please release the build for Windows too. And I would be remiss if I didn’t congratulate the WebKit team for releasing a downloadable application that shows 100/100 on Acid3. Hopefully this post is just a little bit of cold water in the face to those fans thinking that WebKit is somehow “perfect”

Acid3: Neck-and-Neck

Jeff — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:52:22 +0000

WebKit and Opera are really scrambling to be the first browser to fully pass Acid 3. First, Opera claimed they were at 100/100 in a private build, then Ian corrected the test (based on feedback from Apple developers), presumably knocking Opera back to 99/100. And just now, the WebKit guys have turned on SVG Animation (SMIL) in their nightly builds, putting them also at 99/100. This was a surprise to me, since I had heard that their SMIL implementation was not ready for prime-time, so to speak. Oh well, this is great – now we have a second browser implementing SMIL natively and we can truly start pushing for interoperable solutions.

What does it mean for Apple and Opera fans? Probably a lot. What does it mean for web standardistas? Apple and Opera care (more?). What does this all actually mean for web developers at the moment? Not a single thing. Oh well, time to tally up my own similarly-meaningless SVG support score…

[Update 10:25 PM CST: Apple did it. They are the first to achieve 100/100 in Acid3 with a publicly downloadable browser (even if it is only for MacOS)]