Opera Skins will support animated GIF images
22 CommentsPublished March 12th, 2007 12:30 PM EDT By Daniel Goldman
With the latest weekly build of the Opera browser, Opera added support for animated GIF images in Opera Skins.
I myself don’t use any skins, I like the native look and feel of Windows, but apparently I’m in a small minority. Opera Skins allow you to customize the look of the browser with a simple click of a button. Using skins you could make Opera look like Firefox or any other browser.
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I can’t imagine that this will be useful. But I don’t count, I disabled all GIF-animations in Opera
But Skins can be more than eye-candy. I use nontroppo’s “Breeze Simplified MICRO” to save space and get some extra pixels for the rendering-area.
using
I use the standard skin as well. Although, I’m interested in other’s ideas for any “usability/accessibility” improvements and wishes for the standard skin.
Example- I tweaked it a bit to get some more contrast between the active and inactive tabs- I can hardly tell on the default skin which is active, especially when you get the tab loaded in the background with blue text (see the tab on the right in this picture) due to the “visual weight” it adds to the tab. …but maybe I’ve got problems with my eyes.
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Why go with .gif, and not .svg? :S
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Personally, I love the default skin. The only ones I’ve ever like more than the default were scipio’s Carthago skin, and the Opera 6 skin (which I currently have on all of my computers).
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Very unstable and should be avoided by all skin artists!
I hope next weekly fixes this issue
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Sweer
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Hm, I thought gif had died out…
The big minus for gif is the lack of partial transparency, which makes it really hard to produce high-quality icons. But unfortunately, there’s hardly an alternative for animation.
MNG was trying to allow PNG-quality animations, but that format just didn’t gain much attention. Maybe people were just tired of animation at all…
SVG has great animation capabilities, but there’s hardly any authoring software (for the animation part) available, and not everybody likes hand-coding images. And Opera’s performance seems to be way too bad to use it for skins. But true SVG skins (animated or not) would be a big plus!
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I use gif for transparancy and animation, and pngs for everything else. Wikipedia is trying to get people to use SVG, but until IrfanView supports it I will not.
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I personally like the Windows Native skin except for when I’m on a computer that has the Windows Classic skin (any version of Windows older than XP); then native looks ugly. With Vista and XP the native skin looks great, IMHO.
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The problem with the native skin is that when cycling pages with Ctrl-Tab or Right-Click-&-MouseWheel is that new/refreshed pages do not show in blue text (as opposed to black text) as they should. This is a long-standing bug with the native skin. If someone can explain how to repair that aspect, I would appreciate it.
There is a Tweaked Native skin here that addresses this particular issue, but the Tweaked Native skin has some major display issues on the Speed Dial page.
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I can fully understand. If I’m using Opera on Windows, I always use the native skin. Too bad there is no such skin for GTK based environments …
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Isn’t that a bit odd not to mention in the changelog. Well at least a nice feature to add, though I hope Skin designers won’t go crazy with animations.
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Mathias wrote
Searched for Gnome?
http://my.opera.com/community/customize/skins/?search=gnome&x=0&y=0
I use modified Zeus skin both on Win and even on KDE
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Well, the default theme in Opera doesn’t look and feel like Windows… e.g. the blue tabs don’t look native neither in Classic nor Luna.
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Why not use PNGs for transparency also? PNG has every advantage over GIF unless you need animation… And even animation may no longer be a limitation in due time.
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In many cases, especially when dealing with small images, gif has a size advantage over PNG. So you can’t claim PNG has the definite advantage.
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Are you sure? Even if you save the PNG in 256-color, and optimized with tools like pngcrush and PNGOUT?
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I use gif for transparancy and animation, and pngs for everything else. Wikipedia is trying to get people to use SVG, but until IrfanView supports it I will not.
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I’m more retro than GT500. I still use Rijk van Geijtenbeek’s Opera 5 skin. Unfortunately it hasn’t been updated since v7, but I’m probably not missing too much. Animated gif’s won’t add any thrill to my browsing experience.
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Yeah, but in my experience, they have to be really small (~16×16 pixels, sizes under 1KB) to get to that point. I’ve been using 8-bit indexed PNGs with binary transparency — equivalent to GIF in capabilities, so IE6 can handle it without hacks — on my sites for several years, and it’s only when the dimensions get down to emoticon size that I start seeing GIF compress better than PNG.
I keep meaning to look up the format description and see if the PNG header is bigger. It could just be overhead.
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The overhead people see with PNG files are usually PNGs whit metadata stored in the final image. There is no reason for storing it in the final product like for a theme for Opera.
Without the metadata PNG files should be smaller than GIF file, thought there will always be occasions a GIF can be smaller.
PNG files are quite a bit more complex than GIF files, adding poor output support (even from some versions of Adobe Photoshop) adds to the confusion about PNGs real potential.
MNG as was mentioned is a lot more complex, and does not even have the same file signatur, making it far from compatible with most PNG decoders. At lest APNG has a fallback for single image display for decoders that doesn’t support APNG. But then again, how many of you have ever heard about APNG. Maybe SVG could give us what we want. Though not heavily supported out there yet, it is at least getting somewhere. And vector graphics looks so much nicer after all. Doesn’t it!?!
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Ctrl-Tab or Right-Click-&-MouseWheel is that new/refreshed pages do not show in blue text (as opposed to black text) as they should. This is a long-standing bug with the native skin. If someone can explain how to repair that aspect, I would appreciate it. exactly . very good works