Opera’s default user interface hasn’t changed dramatically since Opera 8. All this is about to change with the upcoming release of Opera 9.5 (Code-named Kestrel). Today marks the first public outing of this all-new UI.

The development of the new skin has been running in parallel with the development of Kestrel, but has been kept secret, even from many Opera employees. The inspiration for the new skin is clear. As Johan Borg puts it on the Desktop Team blog:

If one word should describe the new look, it would be Sharp. We wanted to create a skin with clean lines and clear icons, inspired by the intuitive symbols you can expect at an airport and in line with our Scandinavian heritage. This also better matches the look and feel we introduced on the Wii and refine in Opera 9.5 for Windows Mobile.

As a frequent visitor to airports (See Oslo Gardermoen in some of opera’s product pages), I can see some of this inspiration show through. The tab bar is the most visually distinct part of the new theme, and could become somewhat of a trademark visual clue. With a dark glossy strip, and two arrows—which make up the new tab and trash can buttons—always pointing forward, it certainly stands out. This visual trick reminds me of the arrow in the Fedex logo.

The panels button on the right hand side makes it much easier to discover and open the panels, especially on Mac where the previous opening strip was disabled due to not running applications in full screen mode. On Mac however, the tab bar remains visually the same as the previous Kestrel skin, with the updated icon positions.

The rest of the interface is toned down and understated, in swathes of grey. I think this works best for the icons on the status bar, where the grey icons don’t call out for attention and steal your eyes focus. The camera icon is perhaps one of the nicest in the set.

Just like Kestrel, the skin is going through refinement, and progress marches on. If you’d like to see the new skin and download the latest build then head over to the Desktop Team blog.

Last month, eWeek reported that PayPal intends to block unsafe browsers from accessing their site. They’ve focused on phishing detection and support for Extended Validation SSL Certificates. So what are these features, and why does PayPal think they’re critical? And just which browsers are they likely to block?

Phishing protection has an obvious appeal for a site whose accounts are one of the biggest phishing targets on the web.  Opera 9.1 and up, Firefox 2, and Internet Explorer 7 check the websites they visit against lists of known fraudulent sites. These browsers will warn the users before they accidentally type their credentials into a bogus log-in form. While this makes no difference when a user is already on PayPal’s site, it does mean the user is less likely to get his or her password stolen, and thieves are less likely to carry out fraudulent transactions with the account.

Extended Validation or EV certificates are like normal SSL certificates: they encrypt your web activity to prevent eavesdropping. What makes them different is that EV certificates require the issuer to verify the site owner more thoroughly. Browsers with EV support will display an indication that the site has been verified, usually by turning part or all of the address bar green. This is intended to give the user greater confidence that the site is legit. EV certificates are currently supported by IE7 and development versions of Opera 9.50 and Firefox 3. (You can preview a version of Opera with EV support by downloading Opera 9.50 beta 2.)

(It’s worth noting that Opera 9.50 beta 2 is stricter about verifying EV certificates, and will not show PayPal with a green bar because it loads images and scripts from another site. More recent preview releases will, like IE7 and Firefox 3, be satisfied if the main page is EV and the resources are all protected by regular SSL.)

So which browsers might get turned away at the gate?

In a follow-up story, PayPal clarified that they have absolutely no intention of blocking current versions of any browsers, and that they would only block obsolete browsers on outdated or unsupported operating systems. So an Opera 9 user on Windows XP isn’t likely to get shut out of PayPal anytime soon. But a Windows 98 user might have cause for concern.

Browser detection is extremely tricky to get right, requiring frequent adjustments. It looks like PayPal intends to take the minimalist approach: Assume most browsers are capable of handling what you send them, and only block the problematic ones.

Opera Mini’s usage statistics for the First Quarter of 2008 are in and they look promising!

Opera’s first “State of the Mobile Web” report is broken down into several sections, one of which covers “Top Trends”. According to the report, social networking sites claim nearly 40% of all traffic worldwide!

In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

Since the birth of Opera Mini in 2005 and the public release in January of 2006, Opera Mini’s user base has grown to over 44 million users worldwide and continues to grow strong. This incredible growth means that the number of Opera Mini users have increased 26% since the last quarter in 2007!

Opera Mini cumulative users per month

With over 2.4 billion page views in March alone, Opera Mini users consumed more than 33 million MB of data! That’s a 57% increase in page views and almost an 88% increase in data transferred when compared to the last quarter of 2007!

Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month (left) and total data consumed per month in MB (right).

Content Preferences

By examining aggregate numbers, we are able to paint a picture of the types of sites and services that win on the mobile Web. Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:

• Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
• Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
• Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
• Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

For a complete break down of the top 10 countries and top 10 most visited sites per country, navigate over to the State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008 report!

Top 10 sites in the U.S.

1. www.myspace.com
2. www.google.com
3. www.mocospace.com
4. www.yahoo.com
5. www.facebook.com
6. www.live.com
7. www.hi5.com
8. www.wikipedia.org
9. www.itsmy.com
10. www.ebay.com

Countries achieving the top 10 list include: Russia, Indonesia, China, United States, India, South Africa, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Germany and Poland.

The day has finally come. Opera’s Core team joined the blogosphere with its ‘Opera Core Concerns’ blog.

The Core team at Opera is responsible for the fundamental core of the Opera browser. It’s the rendering engine (and more). It’s what makes it possible for Opera to easily build their browser across all different platforms and devices.

Here’s how the Core team describe themselves:

“What we call “Core” at Opera refers to the platform-independent internal components of our browser. Opera delivers web browsers on more than a dozen different operating systems and platforms, on devices ranging from state of the art desktop computers via game consoles and TVs down to handheld devices with fairly limited processing power. The same Core code base is used across the entire product range. This enables us to deliver the same feature set and level of standards support regardless of the target device.

Being part of Opera for the past couple years, I’ve come to recognize the smart developers and engineers of the Core team. They are folks who truly know and work with the nitty gritty details of Web standards and core browser technology.

What I’d like to see them blog about
Ideally, I’d like to see the Core team blog turn into Hallvord’s blog, but on steroids. Hallvord, who does Core QA at Opera, regularly dissects the issues and problems with sites that don’t play well with Opera.

I’d like to see the Core team blog ‘regularly’ blog about and explain the issues (and solutions) that Opera has with certain sites. The benefits for such kind of blogging are enormous.

1. It creates an open dialog with the Web developers working on those broken sites. Fixing the problems will probably be placed on a higher priority.
2. Not only does it create an open dialog with the developers of those sites in question, it also opens the door wide for the Web developer community and gives them access to our Core engineers.
3. By highlighting the actual reasons of why certain sites break or don’t work in its browser, people won’t view Opera as a sub-par, deficient browser, but rather place the blame on broken code and the developers working on those sites.

In addition, I’d like to see the Core team blog about the enhancements and fixes that are made to the Core code. When new desktop builds are made public, the Desktop team generally brushes over only some of the many items in the ‘Core’ changelogs. I’d like to see the Core blog complement those changelogs.

My hope
I sincerely hope the Core blog will have fresh and interesting content on a regular basis, and that it won’t fizzle after the initial momentum.

Matthew Miller over at ZDNet has written a nice review of the new Opera Mobile 9.5 for mobile phones. Here are some highlights:

After using Opera Mobile 9.5 for several days [...], I have to say it is the new standard for web browsing on a mobile device.

Opera Mobile 9.5 takes [the browsing] experience to the next level with quick context-sensitive zooming (called Opera Zoom), fluid finger scrolling and panning, multiple tabbed browsing, ability to save pages for offline viewing, fast page loading, Flash Lite 3 support, and more.

IMHO, Opera Mobile 9.5 is even better than the iPhone’s Safari browser because I can perform functions like text selection, copy and paste, manage passwords, and save or send images from a web page.

Read the entire ZDNet review here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/mobile-gadgeteer/?p=1107

Read more about Opera Mobile here:
http://www.opera.com/products/mobile/

Opera Mobile 9.5 was announced back in February but has not yet been released for download. It can, however, be found preinstalled in some mobile phones, such as the HTC Advantage X7510, which Mr. Miller used for his review.

Opera’s preferences window (keyboard shortcut: CTRL+F12) provides access to preferences the are most commonly adjusted. There are many more options that are available for you to adjust, however, they are hidden and can be found in the built-in preferences editor.

To access the hidden preferences editor, type opera:config into the address bar and press enter. To learn more about each opera:config entry, click the help link at top right side in the preferences editor.

Opera Preferences Editor

The following are some useful opera:config entries.

^# = Copy & paste in address bar or select entry, right click & click Go to URL
^! = Requires Opera restart
^* = Available in Opera 9.50

David Carnoy of CNET recently published a column about how to improve Sony’s PlayStation 3. Number three on the list was “Improve the browser – or scrap it altogether in favor of something else.” And he’s right. Anyone who’s ever used the PS3 browser knows its limitations. Browsing to any web page that includes some kind of rich content (special Javascript or embeded Flash videos, for example) causes a prompt to appear asking if the user would like to run external scripts. If you say yes, very often the browser then complains it has run out of space and will not load the page. I’ve gotten into the habit of just saying “no” each time it asks.

But what makes Carnoy’s column especially interesting to us is that he specifically mentions the Opera browser:

A lot of folks would like to see Sony move to an Opera-based browser, which runs on Linux (and the Wii uses). Whether that’s the right solution or not, Sony can do better in the Web-surfing department. Heck, if the iPhone can have good Web browser, why can’t the PS3 and the PSP have good ones?

As a PS3 owner myself, I would, of course, love it if Sony moved in this direction. And for those worrying about Flash content, Haavard makes a good point that Flash Lite 3 would surely work on the PS3.

The ball’s in your court, Sony!

Opera Software today released Opera Mini 4.1, the newest version of Java based Opera web browser that works with nearly all mobile phones.

Opera Mini 4.1 introduces the following new features:

• Opera Mini 4.1 is up to 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0
• URL completion auto-suggest, making address input easy and intuitive
• Web pages can be saved for later off-line viewing
• New quick find feature for words and phrases (similar to Ctrl+F function in desktop browsers)
• Images, ringtones and other content can be downloaded without leaving Opera Mini

This is, of course, in addition to already useful features such as Opera Link, file upload, custom searches, and more.

According to Jon von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera Software, Opera Mini boasts 44 million users worldwide. Take the guided tour and become user 44,000,001 today!

Download Opera Mini 4.1:
http://www.operamini.com/download/

Hakon Wium Lie, the CTO of Opera, is in Prague now meeting with Web enthusiasts and Czech Opera community members. He sat down with folks at root.cz and talked about the early days on the Web and his work with proposing CSS.

It’s an interesting interview with Hakon, which mostly covers his personal involvement in helping the Web move forward.

What I found most fascinating about this interview was his early vision of HTML and CSS.

After Netscape introduced the <font> tag and “color” attribute, Hakon fought hard against it.

“However, Bert Bos and I felt strongly that HTML should not degenerate into a visual language. We wanted HTML to remain a semantic language so the content could be presented on all sorts of devices, not just visual ones. Therefore we developed CSS. So, in a way, you could say that CSS was developed to save an even more important language, namely HTML.”

This vision is very much still alive today, especially with the upcoming HTML 5.

(Read the interview with Hakon)

(Hakon Wium Lie on his OLPC laptop)

The Opera Mini team is set to release its first major update to the popular Opera Mini 4 browser. The update, Opera Mini 4.1, is due out this week.

Opera Mini 4.1 adds the following new functionality:

• Ability to search for text within a webpage
• URL suggestions based on bookmarks and browsing history
• Ability to download files directly to the phone (only on phones with JSR-75 support)
• Ability to save webpages for offline use (only on phones with JSR-75 support)

A beta version of Opera Mini 4.1 has been out since early April.

The second public beta of Opera 9.5 (Kestrel) was officially released today, boasting many performance, security, and user interface enhancements.

One of the most useful features is called “Quick Find.” It is a full text history search that can be done directly from the address bar. CNET’s Download Blog quickly took notice, publishing this favorable review.

Opera 9.5 Beta 2 also includes alternative tab-closing behaviors. By default, when the user closes a tab, the last active tabs takes focus. For long time Opera users, this makes sense. But it seems to be a sticking point among Firefox users. In Firefox, when a tab is closed, the very next tab takes focus. Users can now choose between the two options in the preferences menu.

Fans of spatial navigation will notice selected links are now highlighted, similar to Opera Mini 4 and the Wii browser.

Opera Link now synchronizes Notes in addition to bookmarks, personal bar, and Speed Dial entries.

Many security enhancements have been added to new beta. Fraud Protection is now enabled by default. An example of an Opera Fraud Protection warning can be seen here. Support for Extended Validation (EV) certificates has been added. (Read more about EV certificates here.) And in the address bar, users will now see a silver lock on yellow field for regular secure sites, a gold lock on green field for secure sites with EV, and a question mark on gray field for HTTPS sites with problems.

Download Opera 9.5 Beta 2:
http://www.opera.com/download/?ver=9.50b2

Changelog for Windows:
http://www.opera.com/docs/changelogs/windows/950b2/

Press release:
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2008/04/24/

Take the guided tour!

It is finally official. Opera Dragonfly is the name for Opera’s forthcoming developer tools. The alpha will be released on the 6^th of May. The application won’t be feature complete, but shows a good foundation of what Opera Dragonfly will become, and the vision of the app. Even in its current form, it is very useful for debugging web sites, and certainly far better than what we have had previously.

It’s important that web developers and designers that will find a use for Opera Dragonfly leave feedback once the alpha is released. This will let us know what functionality is important, and what improvements we need to add. We are committed to making Opera Dragonfly a first class developer tool, that fits the needs of real world web developers.

This is the first project I’ll be the lead of the launch, so it should be an interesting and busy couple of weeks. Things are looking very positive so far. I’m looking forward to seeing developers use Opera Dragonfly and seeing how easier it makes debugging issues in Opera. The easier this process is the better it is for web developers, Opera, and especially our users who will benefit from better web site compatibility in the long run if Opera Dragonfly is successful.

I was pleasantly surprised to see a welcome message for our new Opera Watch bloggers over on the My Opera homepage (screenshot below).

(My Opera homepage)

The Opera browser was a Webware 100 winner in the category of ‘browsing.’

Here’s what Webware said about Opera:

“Opera is one of the oldest browsers around. It’s also made its way into all sorts of consumer electronics, including mobile phones, gaming portables, and even home video game consoles. Opera has combined many technological services into its desktop Web browser and is commonly regarded as the first to implement tabs for viewing multiple Web pages in the same window.”

It’s interesting to note that IE7, Firefox, Safari, and Maxthon also won in the ‘browsing’ category. It makes you wonder, though, how much the Webware 100 awards actually mean…

I recently made a video showing off WinGogi (the Windows version of the preview build available at Opera Labs) scoring 100/100 on the Acid3 test and passing the Acid2 test. In that video I also mentioned that it was a lot more efficient on Google Maps. I said that current weekly and stable builds of Opera have a hard time with Google Maps. While I was testing out some stuff in a virtual machine running Vista x64 (the same version I made the video on, and the same version I normally browse on) I found that this was not entirely true. The latest weekly build at that time (Windows build 9864) of Opera 9.5 runs Google Maps much better than I thought.

With Opera, the most common cause of performance and stability issues (not only like the one I ran into, but crashing issues as well) are related to a single file. This file is opera6.ini and it is where Opera stores all of your settings. The issue is believed to be caused over time as you update from version to version of Opera (due to this reason, weekly build users like me tend to experience this issue much more frequently), or when system crashes and such cause corruption to the opera6.ini file. When there are discrepancies in this file, it tends to cause problems in Opera ranging from lowered performance and hang-ups to crashing.

Fortunately for those of us suffering from opera6.ini related issues, the fix is as simple as deleting/renaming the opera6.ini file. The down side is that you will have to reconfigure Opera as if it were brand-new, as Opera will create a new opera6.ini file with the default set of preferences the next time you launch it (note that just a re-install of Opera cannot fix this issue). The plus side is that you can simply rename opera6.ini to opera6.ini.bak (or any other name you want) so that your old opera6.ini file is still there in case generating a new opera6.ini didn’t fix your problems.

So, how do you go about deleting opera6.ini? It’s simple. Just follow these instruction:

• Open “About Opera” (click help, then click on “About Opera”).
• Find the path to the preferences file.
• Copy and paste that path into the address bar in “My Computer”.
• Make sure that Opera is no longer running at this point, otherwise this will not work.
• Find the file named opera6.ini (or a file called opera6 that Windows claims is a “Configuration Settings” file).
• Rename that file to something like opera6.ini.bak or backup_opera6 so that you keep a backup copy of it.
• Close “My Computer”, and open Opera.
• Now you just need to set Opera back up the way you like it.

To make it easier to assimilate these instructions, I’ve also made a short video detailing how this works. The video can also be downloaded in WMV (7.7M) and XviD (9.5M) formats. Both are 800×600 pixels in size, and were recorded in Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 running in VMWare.

It has been nearly a month since leaving Opera Software; I’m adjusting to life outside of Opera. The new project, which I’ve started working on, has taken up lots of my time; it hasn’t left much time for blogging here on Opera Watch.

Opera Watch is a great resource for Opera users/fans and potential users alike; I really want to see it continue and be ‘the place’ for Opera news on the Web. My new project, however, hasn’t left me much time for full-time blogging.

I’ve asked a few members of the Opera community to join the Opera Watch team and help with the blogging.

I’m delighted to announce our new team, which will hopefully continue to grow over time.

New bloggers
Please help me give a warm welcome to Arthur Wilkinson (a.k.a GT500), Kyle Baker, Kelson Vibber, Tamil, Charlie Reinehr (a.k.a. BAMAToNE), and David Storey.

I suspect these names will be familiar to many of you.

I’m really excited to have David Storey, Opera’s Chief Web Opener, on board too. His knowledge of Web standards is immense and whose opinion I greatly respect. It’s great to have you on board, David.

I’m pretty excited to have these new bloggers on board. I look forward to a new era of Opera Watch.

As for me, I’ll still be blogging here, though not at the same rate and frequency (since starting Opera Watch in 2004 I wrote a total of 963 posts).

Here’s a bit about our new bloggers to help you get to know them better:

Arthur Wilkinson
Arthur Wilkinson has been using Opera on the desktop side since at least early 2001. He discovered Opera while learning Java programming. It was recommended in his first Java Programming book for testing Java Applets since it was the only Windows browser at the time that supported the Sun Java Runtime Environment. Since Arthur made the switch those many years ago he has found to love the advanced features, faster browsing, better security, and especially the trend to build in more features than he actually needs.

Kelson Vibber
Kelson Vibber is a web developer in Southern California. He was first introduced to Opera by a college classmate in 1999, when both were working in a campus computer lab. These days, he uses both Opera and Firefox on Windows and Linux on a daily basis, as well as other browsers for development purposes.

Kelson has been involved in promoting both Opera and Firefox, and launched the Alternative Browser Alliance campaign to encourage greater cooperation among both browsers’ fan communities.

In his spare time, he enjoys reading science-fiction, fantasy, and comic books, and has maintained a fan website dedicated to the super-hero, The Flash, since 1996.

Kyle Baker
Kyle Baker was born in Western North Carolina in 1986, where he grew up with his parents and two older brothers. His first chance to use the Internet was not until the year 1997 when his family got a brand new personal computer and dial-up Internet access. It was not for another few years before he was first introduced to Opera.

Kyle has been using the Opera browser for approximately eight years now. He mainly uses the desktop version of Opera, but has in the past used Opera Mini, Opera Mobile and Opera for the Nintendo Wii. Kyle first began using Opera as his browser of choice due to the fact that Opera’s tabbed browsing feature allowed him to accomplish tasks much faster over dial-up Internet access than other alternative browsers that he had tested. Shortly after choosing Opera as his daily browser, he became interested in web design and development which also led to an interest in web standards (an area that Opera has been very loyal in supporting).

Kyle’s current occupation is a full-time student. He is currently a computer science major at North Carolina State University. He does a little bit of web design as a hobby and voluntarily manages and maintains three separate web sites (a personal blog, a small forum for BMW automobile enthusiasts and a club website for A.C.M. and A.I.T.P. at North Carolina State University).

Charlie Reinehr
Charlie Reinehr works as an IT administrator at The University of Alabama. He is a frequent contributor on the Opera Forums and has been an Opera user for the better part of a decade. Charlie runs the largest and most popular Opera group on Facebook.

Tamil
Tamil has been writing Opera tips, tricks and tweaks on his blog since 2005. His blog, which reads like a FAQ, has become well read over the years. Tamil is also a very active member of the Opera Forums, with over 82,000 posts.

David Storey
David Storey heads up the Open the Web initiative at Opera. This small global team is tasked with improving the compatibility of web sites across Opera’s wide range of browsers, as well as promoting web standards, accessibility and good practices, so that the web will work for all standards-aware browsers, platforms, devices and users. On his blog, Slightly Ajar, he discusses this work, as well as random topics, from travel to music. David previously worked for CERN, home of the World Wide Web, before taking up his post at Opera Software.