Submitted by Opera Extensions have been confirmed as a feature of Opera 11. “Extensions in Opera is a way for you to easily add new functionality to your Opera browser experience. Developers can easily create extensions using open standards (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) and supported APIs. Extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specifications and this is being considered for an Open Standard effort.”
Well that’s a good and needed addition to Opera.
I love you.
…that is all.
-poundsmack
And new version of Opera Mini, with better support for this and that: http://my.opera.com/chooseopera/blog/2010/10/14/opera-mobile-for-an…
By the way, HTML tags that don’t work shouldn’t work in the previews either.
Edited 2010-10-14 22:22 UTC
I can say is… IT’S ABOUT TIME!!!!!!!!!
I still don’t know what’s the purpose of widgets in a browser…
Yeah, and I don’t want to hear any more about Firefox ripping off Opera
I hope somebody makes an Opera version of Vimperator. It’s the only thing I miss from Firefox.
Doubtful, as none of the other extension systems are not nearly as flexible as Gecko’s.
Bingo, someone said it!
These are HTML/CSS/JS patches, not extensions.
Would Google ever be forced to provide extension capability to block ads, if adblock+ didn’t already exist?
These sandboxed extensions allow browser vendors to veto innovation. They’re good up to a point, but I feel they set a bad precedent (similar to Apple app-store).
What is that “it”? That “none of the other extension systems are not nearly as flexible as Gecko’s”? That’s BS as no one knows how flexible Opera’s extension really is.
The teaser reads “using open standards (HTML5, CSS, JavaScript) and supported APIs“, right? Moreover, the linked page says
In my mind, Firefox has set a de facto standard as to browser extensions. Should Opera go against the wealth of extensions available to FF users, they would just prove that some immensely stupid people sit in their top ranks. But it wouldn’t be the first time a company shoots itself in the foot. But I hope that won’t happen. Opera’s own co-authored CSS became a standard, Netscape’s Javascript became a standard, why wouldn’t Mozilla’s extension system in Firefox become a standard?
Coming this late in the “browser extension match”, I would (if I were Opera of course) reuse FF’s whole system and, if I have any added value, extend it. I guess the extension system itself has extension points…
We’ll never be able to tell.
There’s something I don’t get. First, given that Chrome (or webkit?) has been praised for its sandboxing of tabs and, IIRC, efforts have been going on to sandbox the execution of programs in Mac OS X (or was it just plugins in Safari?), I thought the sandbox concept was always a good thing. Second, how can allowing extensions have the effect of vetoing innovation? Doesn’t it rather allow wild ideas to come to life?
Could you elaborate more on this?
I wonder if they can. AFAIK, a lot of FF’s former performance issues came from the fact that a large part of the browser was written in interpreted code (XUL) so that it’s easier to extend it using that language.
Sandboxing random web sites is a good idea and harms nothing. The site still functions, it just can’t interfere with other sites. Sandboxing extensions is quite different since it’s a lot more of a deliberate action to install and use one. An extension is supposed to extend the application and therefore needs as close as possible to full access to the application, not some small piece of it.
Firefox extensions allow wild ideas to come to life because you can, in an extension, literally change any aspect of anything in the browser with almost no limitation whatsoever. To add a feature to Opera or Chrome or Safari and call it “Extensions” but have the feature not provide the same level of access as is available in Firefox is a limitation. So-called ‘extensions’ might be given a little piece of the browser in which they can operate, but this might not allow whatever radical and innovative idea the author wished to implement.
If your browser’s extension cannot change any thing and everything then it’s just not an extension as we know them in Firefox.
Edited 2010-10-19 12:11 UTC
Thanks for the info.
After our exchange about Firefox, I downloaded two extensions, Lazarus and Tab Mix Plus… and indeed, TMP is way beyond what I thought was possible for an “extension”. The options window is a marvel with so many options that despite not being a regular Firefox user, I will be making a donation. It offers many possibilities beyond what I’ve been used to. The only thing I haven’t seen, and I didn’t particularly look for it either, is the possibility to save sessions/groups of tabs in files so as to switch from one session to the other or open multiple windows each with its own session.
I believe I’ve seen an extension for that sort of grouping, but the name of it escapes me at the moment. Firefox 4 will probably require those things to be overhauled anyway as their tab management functions are now radically better.
There is no way to know this prior to the announcement of Opera’s extension API.
Opera has a history of using web technologies (HTML, CSS, JS) for things that aren’t strictly related to the web. For example, Unite uses web technologies on the server side, without there being a particular reason for it. Moreover, on an interview on the same event as the announcement Jon von Tetzchner, Opera’s founder and former CEO, said that this is where he believes the future is going. Web technologies used for pretty much everything.
My point is that the fact that Opera’s extensions are written in HTML/CSS/JS tells us nothing about their capabilities. My guess is that they won’t be as powerful as Firefox’s, but they certainly won’t be “HTML/CSS/JS patches,” whatever that may be.
I really don’t understand what you mean by this, but although Opera has “App Stores” for widgets and Unite apps, they allow other means of distribution.
Eh? None are not nearly?
Oops, too many negations.
Good to hear!
“Extensions will be based on the W3C Widget specifications and this is being considered for an Open Standard effort.”
Translation: “We have created a special snowflake that is best suited for promoting Opera, not functionality in general. We want the leverage to impose our special snowflake on others so our implementation can seem superior to other companies playing catch-up.”
Same song, new cover.
Well I don’t fully understand the details of the Opera implementation myself (or Mozilla’s, or Chrome’s–I’m not a developer), and I don’t care as long as this makes way for two things. AdBlock Plus and NoScript. I can’t browse the Web without them. Opera’s current implementation of “content blocking” is a joke to get around blatantly pissing off advertising companies, and for scripts, it’s all or nothing. Opera already has so much functionality it barely needs any more–these are, IMO, the only two glaring omissions.
Opera does have per site content management, including enabling and disabling javascript. If you want you can disable javascript globally and enable it for particular sites.
You have spent too much of your life without noscript
A webpage can contain content from multiple other websites such as intellitext, facebook, twitter and other evil sites.
Edited 2010-10-16 05:51 UTC
+10 OH MY YES
There is simply no comparing “disable javascript for this page/site” type options with NoScript. Even when such options are easy to toggle you don’t get anything like the level of control, and of course usually it’s far harder to deal with than NoScript so people just don’t bother.
How about first rendering the non-standard compliant web (most) as well as Firefox?
And why should anyone care about rendering the non-standard compliant web when there are standards in the first place?
These “non-standard compliant” sites are imposing useless work to browser vendors and slowing down everybody by dragging their feet. How many times has it been said here on OSNews about IE6?
The best way to have them abide by the standards is to not provide any support for them. When their users/readers start to complain or leave, they’ll do what they should have done. Otherwise, I don’t see what incentive they would have for changing the crap they make available out there.
As a webdeveloper, I’m not happy that there are still such sites. I’d like very much to see browser technology evolve at a much higher pace breaking compatibility as needed with older, bad or proprietary standards.
But, also as a webdeveloper I have to understand that people will use older browsers (for one reason or another) and my clients will still want to sell those people stuff.
So, for me that means that I have to STFU and tweak the site to death until in works in IE6&7.
I think the same is true for browser makers. They’d like to leave all the cruft behind, to make their rendering engines modern, to implement the latest standards, but the reality is that there are a lot of sites (the majority?) that are made by half-assed webdevelopers that would break instantly.
So, if I’m a clueless user switching from IE to Opera and find that my favorite recipe site doesn’t work anymore, will I blame the site for not respecting web standards, or will I blame my brand new browser?
There’s a reason that Firefox was successful in the beginning. It was not the extensions (because at the time there were few and less important than they are now), it was the fact that it rendered the current web the same as IE6 while having Tabs, Security and Speed.
TL;DR: You have to be realistic. Sites and people don’t change because one browser developer says so.
Fine. I got you 100%. But then we will see ourselves not being able to exploit the full potential, whatever that “full potential” may mean, and that’s for a somewhat long time to come.
Although I understand all you wrote, I still think that there’s a point where “legacy” should be ditched (for instance, try to create a folder named “con” in XP or Vista…), all the more when 1- that legacy didn’t comply with then-known standards and 2- imposes additional work on browser developers. I don’t mention the availability of tools to “standardize” those sites because I know nothing about it, I can only guess such tools are more available now that the open source software wave has reached us than back then, in the late 90’s or just after…
I don’t have much faith in clueless people’s will to exert intelligence or simply put their brain to use. I think they’ll eat whatever they are served.
As a web developer who has (had?) to deal with such sites, what are the reasons that prevent some of them from “moving on”, redesigning, etc? Is it monetary considerations? service interruption? not seeing the benefit of going clean and standard? or else?
Even if browser makers would behave (and they don’t, Microsoft I’m looking at you) the “full potential” is still a moving target. Of course, I can only dream of a time when in my development I’ll be looking only to the future without wasting time on the past, but realistically speaking it’s not going to happen … ever.
The problem is that change in standards adoption doesn’t happen over night and at the end of the day you have to support legacy as long as there is money in it. For example we’ve stopped supporting IE6 when it dropped under 10% usage, but I have clients that will still probably demand support (and pay for it) for quite some time.
There is no tool to change bad code into good code. There are better code editors, better WYSIWYG editors, but still you have to know what you’re doing. People think that making sites is something that you can pick up in a week or two. When I tell them that it takes years of learning and experience they look at me like I’m an idiot. This is the attitude that’s prevailing among customers and it shows in the quality of the code that’s out there.
True to some extent. Clueless people also have money to spend on-line (so we don’t want to piss them off) and also don’t like change (I know of a colleague designer that works on Win 98, Photoshop 6, IE6 and Firefox 2 – and he’s making good money out of the sites he makes).
The major reason is money and maybe a little service interruption. Clean and standard is not an issue. Clients don’t know and don’t care what happens under the hood.
I don’t have much to add to the rest of the discussion, but…
Unless he only tests in IE6 and Firefox 2, in which case he is stupid, I don’t see anything wrong with this.
If he is producing quality work it doesn’t matter if he is doing it on Windows 7 with CS5 or Windows 95 with Paint.
He doesn’t test very carefully in other browsers, because he has to do it at home. Also, his productivity is not so great because he loses a lot of time waiting for his computer to crash, restart and run Scandisk while losing 1/2 hour of work almost every time (this happens once or twice a day). But he likes his little system. People are creatures of habit …
Tell your colleague that if he installs KernelEx he can install Firefox 3.6 on Windows 98.
I think it’s rad using an old machine to develop for the web; I always preach that with only notepad you could take on the biggest companies and beat them. The web is beautifully open like that.
Maybe with syntax highlighting added, but notepad alone… That would be really hard to use on large codebases, I think.
I guess one would have bigger problems than just syntax highlighting: things like money, time and coffee supplies. Still, it’s entirely possible and some people proved that even with little resources (call it a “notepad”) one can achieve a lot.
That’s what notepad2 is for.
Thanks, I’ll check it out. Oh, did I mention that his installation is 7.5 years old?
There are one or two features I wouldn’t mind adding to Opera with extensions, but I’d much rather have Opera’s built in features work properly.
It’s hard to get excited about new features and improvements when some of Opera’s best existing features are still a bug ridden mess in 10.5-7.
Still, it’s nice to see a substantial and practical change to the browser, rather than the silly gimmicks, pointless (and sometimes usability damaging) eye-candy, and trivial aesthetic tweaking from recent updates. Maybe there’ll be extensions to improve long neglected Opera features, like its now primitive session management.
I hope they strip the browser right down to the bone, and make a lot of the stripped out functionality available as extensions.