Dev.Opera
dev.opera.com · Company blog · on HN since 2007
Opera's developer blog covered web standards, browser features, and projects like Opera Unite, IndexedDB, and CSS will-change.
What HN saysHN links it for Opera's web standards articles and technical history; commenters recall Opera fondly and discuss user agent strings and early video support.
159HN people shared it
69linked it in comments
108stories submitted
1.6Kstory points
3 years agolast shared
2007people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Decentralized p2p application framework in the browser: Opera Unite (2009)5 people · 3 points · first shared 2019 · discussion on HN
- 2The Web Standards Curriculum5 people · 2 points · first shared 2008 · discussion on HN
- 3Opera Unite developer's primer4 people · 13 points · first shared 2009 · 1 comments on HN
- 4Opera for Developers4 people · 1 points · first shared 2010 · discussion on HN
- 5Opera's site specific patching4 people · 1 points · first shared 2015 · discussion on HN
- 6Everything You Need to Know About the CSS will-change Property3 people · 179 points · first shared 2014 · 62 comments on HN
- 7Opera 10 Browser UA string format changed to accomodate bad applications3 people · 32 points · first shared 2009 · 21 comments on HN
- 8An Introduction to IndexedDB (2014)3 people · 15 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 9Houdini and the Extensible Web3 people · 14 points · first shared 2015 · 1 comments on HN
- 10Creating pseudo 3D games with HTML 5 canvas and raycasting3 people · 8 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 11Opera Reader: a new way to read the Web3 people · 3 points · first shared 2011 · discussion on HN
- 12A labs release to get your SPDY senses tingling3 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 13Opera Mobile Emulator build with experimental WebKit prefix support - Dev.Opera3 people · 2 points · first shared 2012 · discussion on HN
- 14CSS: It was twenty years ago today2 people · 299 points · first shared 2014 · 114 comments on HN
- 15In search of the perfect JavaScript framework2 people · 206 points · first shared 2014 · 79 comments on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
mratsim · 2020-01-19
Wow, I did use Opera for years and also on mobile when in Africa with limited data plans.
Time flies, I still remember Opera 10 years ago, they probably had the best tech April Fool's I ever stumbled upon with their "Face gestures"[1].
When you had a team that could create that behind your product, you knew that the team cared and was driven by passion and excellent craftmanship.
[1]: https://dev.opera.com/blog/introducing-opera-face-gestures/
tagawa · 2014-08-22
A few comments:
* I was hoping to be able to use it for a while without signing up first. I nearly walked away.
* It fails to find some feeds, such as for http://dev.opera.com/ and http://www.iheni.com/
* rssheap.com and www.rssheap.com are separate domains so logging in to one doesn't mean you're logged in to the other. I think you should have a 301 redirect on one of them.
* You could add "RSS Heap" in the title tag - then it would show up when bookmarked.
Nice site though. Straight to my SpeedDial.
rplnt · 2013-03-25
> could anyone give an example of a modern application that checks against the user agent string?
Gmail. Google docs, every single page titled something demo, ... basically every other site. And it should die already. Browser vendors put up with it because there are thousands and thousands of sites that wouldn't work just because you have the wrong user-agent string and the web developer was incompetent. Great examples include Chrome's idiotic string[1] and Opera's version 9.80[2].
1. Discussed around.
2. http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-ua-string-changes/
jfaucett · 2012-09-16
Since you say you know html,css, then I think the easiest thing to do would be to learn javascript and jquery and get a github account. This will probably let you see results and start contributing to open source the fastest. Once you get good enough in js you can do some bug fixes for any of the tons of js projects on github and work your way in on that route. I'd say with any non web-centric language (i.e. c, c++, ruby, go, haskell)- especially since you don't know coding yet - your looking at a minimum of two years before you could start actively contributing to a project.
Here's some links to learn js/dom:
MDN: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
Opera Developer Site: http://dev.opera.com/
Javascript Repos on github: https://github.com/languages/JavaScript (read the source!)
Also "javascript the good parts" by Crockford is a good javasceript book.
Erunno · 2012-06-18
Mea culpa, I didn't want to steal the thunder from the great guys at Opera. From my end user perspective I only remember Opera supporting the <video> tag in a version which was released almost a year after Firefox 3.5 [1].
[1] http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/introduction-html5-video/
mrspeaker · 2011-10-04
My favourite javascript raycaster was P01's "Wolf5k" (http://www.wolf5k.com/) - a raycaster in 5k of Javascript: before there was any such thing as canvas! It worked using an obscure, two colour, but programable image format - .xbm files, now killed by the browsers, so it won't work anymore.
But there is a great article on the Opera Dev blog about how to build your own like the parent's: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/creating-pseudo-3d-games-with-html-… (in fact, looking at the code it seems like this post is just a re-write of the Opera code by Jacob Seidelin - though it might me a coincidence)
dave1010uk · 2011-07-22
HTML5 has the datalist element, which provides suggestions for an input box and is similar to a combo box. The best info I can find on it is: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/an-html5-style-google-suggest/
This is currently only supported by Firefox Opera. A JavaScript polyfill to get this working in other browsers would be great.
yread · 2011-05-03
The live speedlink widgets are a great idea!
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/creating-opera-speed-dial-extension…
isleyaardvark · 2010-12-14
The Opera Web Standards Curriculum: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/1-introduction-to-the-web-standards…
I didn't find it until well after I learned HTML & CSS, and I wish I had seen it then. It covers web standards from the bottom up, and would give you a really great foundation to start from.
mbrubeck · 2010-06-22
http://hacks.mozilla.org/ and http://dev.opera.com/ and http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/ have similar content from the other big vendors.
watty · 2010-06-09
Both Mozilla and Opera have great tutorials as well... here's some Canvas tutorials:
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/html-5-canvas-the-basics/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/canvas_tutorial
jarek · 2010-04-14
Every website you visit on your laptop goes through your ISP. Every website you visit on your cell phone goes through your provider. Yes, it's a potential issue. Yes, there is trust involved.
Any stats package worth its salt would record X-Forwarded-For information, which is set by the Mini proxies: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/opera-mini-request-headers/#x-forwa…
theamk · 2023-11-05
Opera tried this in 2009 (as article briefly mentions), it was called Opera Unite: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/
Almost no one used it back then, and it would be even fewer people now. After all, the time of always-on machine which can act as a server "for free" are gone. Even desktops sleep nowdays when not used, and no one would be crazy enough to kill their cellphone/tablet battery to run something that can be served by cloud faster, more reliably and often for free.
shalomv · 2023-09-11
I remember an interesting project in 2009 from Opera called Opera Unite. Its goal was to turn the browser into a server so that you can share back out into the web. They had a few demos "apps" built in but sadly it never went anywhere. It's interesting to imagine how the structure of the web would have evolved if that idea took off. Here's their original post about it: https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/
sanxiyn · 2022-10-14
By the way, this is as old as web. It's ironic to re-read https://dev.opera.com/blog/opera-s-site-patching/ published in 2009, which uses 2022(!) as a stand-in year for far future when hopefully none of this will be required.
shakna · 2020-11-12
2006 was when Opera added the functionality which would become Server Sent. [0]
[0] https://dev.opera.com/blog/event-streaming-to-web-browsers/
niutech · 2020-06-24
You can run Opera Mini MIDP using MicroEmulator on Windows or install Opera Mobile Emulator: https://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-mobile-emulator/
pmlnr · 2020-05-16
Opera tried it, it didn't work:
https://dev.opera.com/blog/taking-the-web-into-our-own-hands/
Current attempts:
DAT: https://dat.foundation/
Zeronet: https://zeronet.io/
Secure Scuttlebutt: https://scuttlebutt.nz/
lmz · 2018-12-18
Oh you do, well at least you used to: https://dev.opera.com/blog/opera-s-site-patching/
Aissen · 2018-05-21
As noted elsewhere in the thread, Microsoft does this as well, and Opera used to do this for broken high-profile websites:
https://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/
Edit: Even Chrome and Safari used to do it:
https://dev.opera.com/blog/opera-s-site-patching/
foob · 2018-01-20
It's a joint W3C Technical Architecture Group and CSS Working Group initiative, you can find a lot of details in this post from the Opera developer blog [1].
[1] https://dev.opera.com/articles/houdini/
jdauriemma · 2017-07-10
This article was useful and concise.
I urge web developers to consider the trade-offs when using CSS hardware acceleration. Properties like `will-change` or `transform3d` substantially increase the client device's energy usage. This has battery-life implications for users on portable devices such as laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. As with any other feature, ask "why" before "how" when prioritizing interactive motion in your webapp.
More info: https://dev.opera.com/articles/css-will-change-property/
acqq · 2016-06-30
Published on 12 February 2013: "300 Million Users and Move to WebKit"
https://dev.opera.com/blog/300-million-users-and-move-to-webkit/
"Opera sends 90 out the door"
"They were sacrificed for strategic choice to dump core technology, with Opera's proprietary engine Presto and JavaScript interpreter Carakan"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5237967
jacobr · 2016-06-10
Actually, we do, since Chromium 51. See https://dev.opera.com/blog/opera-38/
koffiezet · 2015-08-21
I'm pretty sure Opera for iOS uses it's own renderer:
https://dev.opera.com/blog/opera-mini-8-for-ios/
shwetank · 2015-08-21
We at Opera have called on for a single (or at leat a shared) API for making browser extensions, which I think will benefit the developer community immensely (instead of making one set for each browser).
I think now the time is right to take a look again at NEX https://dev.opera.com/blog/introducing-nex/ and standardising core parts of browser extensions.
paulojreis · 2015-07-07
I haven't read everything in detail, but this reminded me of the API developed for modal dialogs. It ended like this:
https://dev.opera.com/blog/showmodaldialog/
Both the ideas seem good, but it's hard to not think about "Embrace, extend and extinguish".
richtr · 2015-02-06
This is awesome.
Here is a link to the 3d web compass I built and submitted to Hacker News 3 years ago [1] (direct link to a demo @ [2]).
I also released a JavaScript library based on that research that may help others use web device orientation without needing to understand all the math involved [3]. That in turn is based on a primer I made for web developers @ [4].
I hope this helps others who want to use device orientation on the web to build web-based compasses, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality experiences!
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4115768.
[2] https://richtr.github.io/Marine-Compass/
[3] https://github.com/richtr/Full-Tilt
[4] https://dev.opera.com/articles/w3c-device-orientation-usage/
grrowl · 2014-06-26
The "Opera Mini" mode renders webpages into a specialised format (OBML), so they function more like interactive images; I'd bet they finally implemented a OBML rendering/UX layer for iOS. "Opera Turbo" would be a standard iOS UIWebView except it routes your requests through a caching and optimisation server for smaller payload and quicker downloads.
Chrome on iOS renders in a UIWebView, too, and enables a similar "bandwidth saving proxy" technique by default which achieves similar results.
More about Opera Mini's compression, OBML (outdated but gives a good overview): http://dev.opera.com/articles/opera-binary-markup-language/
Sadly, I seem to only be able to install the previous version of the app which is a vastly different experience to the screenshots in the App Store. It might not have caught up to Australia's cache servers yet.