What’s New in Opera’s Snapshots: 7 October 2011

Today ushers in another interesting developer snapshot release of Opera desktop! As per usual, if you are using Opera Next you should already have this update — if not, download the snapshot separately.

You can read a more detailed summary of the updates in the snapshot changelog; the most interesting new additions are as follows:

Radial gradients

Opera has supported linear gradients for some time now, but there was still some way to go before we could claim to support the full gradients section of the CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3 working draft. But no more! We now support the full gamut of gradients functionality, plus a little bit of a surprise for secret hunters...

Read more about linear gradients in our new dev.opera article, CSS3 radial gradients.

HTML5 error handling

One of the hotly anticipated fixes to HTML contained in HTML5 is error handling, i.e. what to do with badly formed markup. Previously browser vendors had to work out how to do this by themselves, which lead to differing implementations and therefore inconsistent errors. Earlier on in the year we published an experimental implementation of this in our new HTML5 parser, called Ragnarök — see 100% Ragnarök’n’roll on Opera Labs. Now we are pleased to announce the addition of the Ragnarök parser into our latest snapshot. Say goodbye to the misery of interoperability problems. Well, some of them, anyway.

<style> parsing bug fix

As a requirement to fix the well-known bug whereby <style> elements appended to the document aren't parsed immediately, the BeforeCSS and AfterCSS events are no longer dispatched for <style> elements, only for linked and imported style sheets. This is not a limitation: <style> element can still be retrieved and manipulated using the DOM.