Web Devout tidings

Opera 9 has now been released. Some of the new features include a selective content blocker which can be used to remove banner ads and other unwanted content from webpages, support for BitTorrent distributed downloads, desktop widgets, and improved standards support. See the official changelog for more information.

I will begin testing and updating my standards support resource shortly. It appears as though many positioning bugs have been fixed. Although Opera 9 passes the Acid2 test, note that the test only covers a relatively small selection of features from the standards, and like other browsers, there are still known inconsistencies with the standards in Opera 9. I will post updates on my progress as I test its support.

The latest alpha version of Firefox has been labeled “feature complete,” meaning no significant changes are planned for the webpage layout engine. In response, I have added the Firefox 2.0 information to the Web browser standards support resource. According to my information so far, there have been no significant changes to the areas currently covered in the standards support resource. However, since there were changes to SVG support and I hope to add SVG information to the tables eventually, I have decided to list Firefox 2.0 separately from Firefox 1.5.

Opera 9 information will be added when the public builds are labeled “feature complete” or an equivalent. Opera is known to make significant changes even in the final beta versions, so it’s possible that I will be unable to begin thorough testing until the final version of Opera 9 is released.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 is now available for download. The previous release was a preview of this beta. Although the version that was released in March was announced to be “layout complete”, meaning that no significant additional rendering engine changes would be made until the final release, Beta 2 is now considered “feature complete”, meaning the user interface also isn’t expected to receive any more changes.

The official blog post on the release alludes to new changes in “some CSS behaviors”, but none of the public bug reports that I am tracking have yet been marked as fixed. I will retest the support of some of the areas most likely to be addressed once the final version of Internet Explorer 7 is released or if the bug reports’ statuses change.

Opera 9.0 Beta 1 has been released. This version includes significant improvements to the layout engine, as well as several new user interface features and support for BitTorrent downloads. An official changelog is available.

I have finished the DOM and ECMAScript support information for Internet Explorer 7.

There isn’t much to say. As far as I could see, only three things have been changed:

• Element.style.maxHeight is now supported.
• Element.style.maxWidth is now supported.
• Element.style.minWidth is now supported.

It’s surely a disappointment for those who were hoping for more of a move toward the DOM standards. There were also some changes regarding XMLHttpRequest, but that’s proprietary and thus beyond the scope of my tables.

And sadly, this is not an April Fool’s joke. Sorry.