JAB_Creations - 10:50 pm on Dec 22, 2009 (gmt 0)

Opera has finally released an alpha build of Opera with Presto 2.3 or greater, Presto 2.5 to be more precise in Opera 10.5 [my.opera.com].

There's a ton of new awesome in this build. First and foremost Presto 2.3 introduced Vega [my.opera.com] which is Opera's vector graphics library. For Opera it makes implementing certain things easier but it barrels down to CSS3 properties for web designers like myself. Since there are no official Presto spec pages beyond Presto 2.3 I'll just list the big-hitters outright: border-radius (rounded corners), multiple-background image support per element, border-image support, box-shadow, and 2D transforms. Opera has also made a bit of history by being the first browser vendor to make these properties available without vendor specific prefixes.

Presto 2.4 while never publicly released (at least on any desktop platform) introduces Opera's Carakan [my.opera.com] JavaScript engine. After benchmarking it's DOM and paint performance it was noticeably faster (other types of JavaScript performance will vary of course) though in regards to DOM and paint it solidified Opera's third place (out of five rendering engines (Gecko, KHTML, Presto, Trident, and WebKit) on an internal benchmark I created yesterday coincidentally. While it did not perform the benchmark faster it performed it much more accurately (70 seconds versus as low as 16 with other browsers). Other parts of JavaScript seem to be much faster and naturally it's an alpha (or as mentioned pre-alpha).

Here is an unofficial though reasonably tested list of new CSS based DOM properties that you can detect in Opera 10.5 that did not exist in Opera 10.2 and earlier...

OTabSize
OTransform
OTransition
OTransitionDelay
OTransitionDuration
OTransitionProperty
OTransitionTimingFunction
backgroundClip
backgroundOrigin
backgroundSize
borderBottomLeftRadius
borderBottomRightRadius
borderImage
borderRadius
borderTopLeftRadius
borderTopRightRadius
boxShadow
bufferedRendering
wordWrap

Additionally Huib Kleinhout reported that there will be no more builds of Opera 10.2 as they have been concentrating entirely on 10.5.

So Opera has finally added some critical CSS3 property support leaving IE as the only CSS 2.1 browser on the market (minor CSS3 text effects don't count and KHTML at least has border-radius). It's not difficult to envision multi-column and gradient support making it's way in to Presto 2.6. This new decade we'll see web designers doing web design with web design, not with meshed graphic design and is going to be totally awesome.

- John