Opera Desktop team just released the first alpha of Opera 9.5 (codenamed Kestrel). Kestrel adds a lot on top of what could be found in Merlin (Opera 9):
- Generally improved performance
- CSS3 Selectors
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- Support for several CSS2.0/2.1/3 properties improved
- Fix for this annoying rounding problem
- Futhark, an entirely new ECMAScript engine! (In some cases this means performance regressions compared to the old Linear B, in some cases performance improvements, but don’t worry – the end result is still faster than both JScript and SpiderMonkey.)
- Mozilla JavaScript 1.5 style getters and setters
- Native support for HTML5 getElementByClassName method
- SVG support in the img element and in CSS image
Well, those are some highlights that I find worth mentioning. The links to the full changelogs (which are pretty large) and the actual builds can be found at Opera Desktop Team Blog: Go and get Opera 9.5 alpha!
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4 Responses to “Take Opera Kestrel for a testdrive”
September 5th, 2007 at 8:10 am
FWIW, Merlin is the codename of the 9.x Opera desktop browser until version 9.5 and up (which is Kestrel). Before that there was no specific codename for the desktop browser that I’m aware of. (The engine is still called Presto.)
September 5th, 2007 at 10:29 am
Ah, I was confusing Presto and Merlin. Corrected.
September 5th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
The successor of Presto, use in Kestrel, is called Core-2.
September 12th, 2007 at 7:21 am
No, Core-2 is simply the name of a branch.
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