Hot summer build Opera 12.50

Summer is usually a fairly quiet time at the offices of Opera Software, but looking at the latest build of Opera 12.50 and you can’t say that our developers are on vacation.

Some features from the huge list of changes deserve special attention:
')

Stable CSS properties without prefixes

A wise person ( our dear Bruce Lawson ) once said: “The easiest way to not have problems with prefixes is not to use them.” In this build, we first remove the prefixes for the properties: Transition , Animation, and Transform .

If you used properties with the prefix -o- (or others) in your code, like -o-transform and -o-transition , make sure that the version also contains the version without the prefix, because the support of these properties with the prefixes will disappear from Opera 12.50 .

Of course, the same thing happened with the corresponding events and properties in JavaScript, so the oTransitionEnd event will become a transitionend , exactly as described in the specification.

Websocket

Despite the fact that the current stable release of Opera 12 already has support for sockets, it was disabled by default due to the fact that it was implemented according to an outdated specification. This assembly corrects the situation and the version of the sockets now corresponds to the latest version of the WebSockets RFC-6455 specification and, attention !, the sockets are now enabled by default!

New APIs for extensions

A few months ago, we released Opera's Labs build with an API for extensions to take screenshots, load resources, and filter URLs. We have received great reviews from you and are now releasing these APIs from a lab in a dark basement right into a stable branch.

UA line changes

Opera 12.50 will be released with a simplified UA string. First, we dropped the substring U; related to the Netscape browser, 1995, and something else that we and you no longer need to worry about. The second change led to the deletion of the substring pointing to the language. As an example, UA for Opera 12.01 for OS X:

 Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8.0; U; ru) Presto/2.10.289 Version/12.01 

and UA for Opera 12.50 for OS X:

 Opera/9.80 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.8.0) Presto/2.12.363 Version/12.50 

In the corresponding Mozilla bug report, Henry Sivonen explains why this is so important. If you need to know the user's locale, then you need to look not at the UA, but at the Accept-Language header.

All these changes were not invented by us and they correspond to the corresponding steps of IE, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. We are not aware of incompatibilities with sites related to these changes, except for one exception: now Google+ throws out a warning about an incompatible browser, when accessing this new build, due to too thorough parsing of the UA string. We have already informed Google about this and are looking forward to the fix. KHM-KHM.