What’s New in Opera Development Snapshots: 27 July 2011 Edition

The biggest news for this snapshot is the first practical implementation of the Microdata API in a browser.

As usual, your Opera Next should already have this update (checking opera:about should give you "Presto/2.9.186 Version/12.00" under Browser Identification).

  • Implementation of Microdata APIs

    This release of Opera has full support for Microdata DOM APIs. There is a bug around the implementation on Mac, Linux/FreeBSD versions of this snapshot that we are hoping to fix as soon as we can.

    What this API would allow you to do is to access microdata specified using microdata attributes like itemprop, itemscope via a JavaScript interface.

    Opera's Philip Jägenstedt also added a bunch of patches to make validator.nu validate microdata attributes better.

    Tests written while implementing the APIs will also be shortly submitted to the W3C test suite.

  • href of a link element is no longer empty if it is same as document url.

    Not sure why, but you can legally have such markup <link href="<same url as where this markup exists>">. In this specific case, Opera used to return an empty string when queried for the href attribute on the link (here is an example).

  • Change events now fire when clicking on labels associated with an input checkbox

    This was a regression and this has now been fixed.

  • Inset Box Shadow on input text elements

    Opera was not rendering inset box shadows on input text elements which has now been fixed (here is an example).

  • Maxlength attribute ignored if set to zero

    Another no-idea-why-anyone-would-do-it-but-should-conform-to-spec-anyway bug. So, if you set maxlength as 0 for an input element, Opera used to ignore it, but now it longer does (here is a demo).

  • Default widths of input of types url and email

    The default width of url and email inputs was longer than regular text inputs. So, now your default inputs in a form will look prettier!

  • Computed Value of overflow now returns auto on hidden elements

    For some reason the computed value for overflow returned on an element hidden with display:none was always visible instead of the default of auto causing weird effects in some design patterns such as jQuery UI's accordion (note the scrollbar that appears when clicking "Section 4" does not appear on previous versions of Opera).

  • No longer creating a new stacking context for position:fixed with no z-index set

    This demo would explain this best. In previous versions of Opera, we used to create a new stacking context whenever a parent element had position:fixed but now we no longer do this, and match the behaviour of other browsers.

  • Finally, jsfiddle is working again!

    • Please do try it out and let us know if any of these do not work for you, or any other suggestions you might have!