Changelog for Opera 8.01 for Macintosh
Opera 8.01 for Macintosh is available for download.
This changelog contains all major changes since Opera 7.54u2 for Macintosh. A separate overview of changes since Opera Beta is available.
Release Notes
- This release is a recommended security upgrade. See the Security section for additional information.
- The file version number of search.ini is now 6. All files with lower version numbers will be overwritten on upgrade.
- The preference file is now known as "Opera 8 Preferences". Setups will be changed to Opera 8 default on install, but bookmarks, notes, contacts, e-mail, and chat settings will remain intact.
At first Glance
- One download, 15 languages: Opera automatically installs with your system language.
- New and improved security features.
- "Fit to window width" abolishes horizontal scrolling.
- Improved default menu and toolbar setups.
- Tabbed browsing is default.
- Support for XmlHttpRequest giving full Gmail support.
- New Start bar gives easy access to useful features.
- Notification of blocked pop-ups.
- Simple retrieval of closed pages and blocked pop-ups.
- Elegant e-mail attachment handling.
- Improved newsfeed reader.
- Automated weekly check for new updates.
- New Browser JavaScript and User JavaScript features.
Main Changes since Opera 7.54u2
User Interface
- Opera's user interface will automatically display in the language used by Mac OS X on your computer. The download contains language files for Apple's 15 default languages; Danish, Dutch, US English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese.
- "Open new pages in tabs" and "Continue from last time" are now the default settings.
- Improved default toolbar and menu setup. Most important changes:
- Messaging and newsfeed menus added dynamically as accounts and subscriptions are set up.
- Removed "Navigation" menu.
- New Start bar drops down from the address field to allow quick access to home page, bookmarks, and the user's most visited pages.
- New View bar toggled by button on address bar contains settings for modifying the page view, including new "Fit to window width" feature.
- Yellow security bar displayed inside address field on secure pages.
- New preference dialog. Most important changes:
- Split into four tabs; General, Wand, Web pages, and Advanced.
- Added preferences for showing notification pop-ups for messages, blocked pop-ups, and completed file transfers ().
- Skins have moved to the dialog.
- Collapsed address bars in pop-ups display domain name and security information (when appropriate).
- The search field on the View bar should now correctly be "Find in page" for all platforms. Please note that when upgrading from previous versions, this release will overwrite search.ini files whose version number is 5 or lower.
- Added search suggestion using the default search engine at the end of the address field autocomplete dropdown.
- Added dialog for reporting sites that do not work well with Opera. Available in the "Help" menu.
- "Match whole word" option in "Find in page" now correctly locates words next to punctuation marks.
- When starting download, allow transfer dialog to stay in the background.
- Both typed and redirected URLs will now be saved to address field drop-down history.
- Added font preference setting for reading e-mail.
- Changed default home page to portal.opera.com.
- Implemented Kiosk Mode for registered copies of Opera. Run from command line with the -kioskmode switch. See Opera's Command Line Options for an overview of available switches.
- Keyboard shortcut changes and fixes:
- Avoid single-key shortcuts for drastic actions;
- Shift+P replaces P for print preview.
- Shift+I replaces G for toggling image display. I loads all images.
- Added Shift+G as a toggle for author mode/user mode.
- Cmd+F11 toggles "Fit to window width".
- Cmd+U should delete only one line in multi-line edit fields.
- Changed Quick preferences shortcut to Alt+F12 to work around shortcuts used by Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger).
- F4 and Shift+F4 shortcuts exchanged; Shift+F4 now toggles panels with panel selector.
- Disabled keyboard shortcuts involving Alt Gr during inline find to prevent interference with typing of special characters.
- Alt+Shift+F12 launches Appearance dialog, Command+F12 is additional shortcut for Preferences.
- Scrollbars will now change direction without releasing the mouse button.
- Added ability to drag files into Opera Mail composition window attachment list.
- Added ability to edit proxy settings and default download path in Preferences. Last download location will be remembered and used.
- Sized pop-ups are no longer maximized.
- Error messages in the JavaScript console now include the name of the document containing the error.
Display and standards
- Implemented support for SVG 1.1 Tiny.
- Implemented Opera's Extensible Rendering Architecture (ERA):
- Added "Fit to window width" feature that squeezes page contents to make them fit the width of the screen and avoid horizontal scrolling.
- The "Small screen" mode now includes more of the page's original styling.
- New User JavaScript feature
- Multiple display fixes that improve rendering of the Acid2 test.
- Fixed issues with styling of <fieldset>. This solves display problems with the Wordpress administrative interface.
- Support for XmlHttpRequest -- Gmail Web mail fully supported.
- Added support for TextRange with methods collapse, move, moveStart, and moveEnd, required by Google Suggest.
- Added support for document.selection and document.getSelection in form input fields.
- Added support for
RegExp.leftContext and RegExp.rightContext.
- Added support for DOM3 Load and Save.
- Added support for simple Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) information in properties of .jpg files.
- Fixed display issues with the "input" and "button" elements.
- Fixed issue with some installed fonts not being properly detected and used.
- Fixed styling of xml:lang.
- Fixed several issues with bidirectional text.
- Made handling of tables within 'center' tags consistent with other browsers.
- Corrected handling of the "object" tag.
- Added support for Shockwave and Flash transparency.
- Introduced Browser JavaScript, a JavaScript file that fixes the rendering of certain Web pages and page elements that malfunction in Opera. The feature is disabled by default, but users who wish to test it may enable download and use by setting
Browser JavaScript=1 in the [User Prefs] section of the "Opera 8 Preferences" file. Opera will then check for updates weekly. Please note that enabling the feature in its current implementation may impact performance. For further information about Browser JavaScript, see: Browser JavaScript Explained. For further information about "Opera 8 Preferences", see Opera6.ini Explained.
- Web specifications supported in Opera 8.
Messaging
- E-mail and chat account handling is now located in the "Tools" menu.
- Improved handling of e-mail attachments
- Attachments in are now displayed above the message headers.
- New "Save attachments" dialog allows for saving multiple attachments in one operation.
- Image attachments also displayed inline.
- When user sets up a gmail.com account in the "New account" wizard, correct values are filled out automatically.
- Improved handling of quoted-printable encoding. QP is now decoded by default in incoming messages, in violation of RFC2047 §5.3. RFC compliance can be met by setting "Allow Incoming QuotedString QP=1" in accounts.ini.
- Support for irc: URLs.
- IRC settings are now stored in incoming options file rather than in accounts.ini.
- Setting in IRC account properties for whether or not to accept incoming connections.
- Pressing Cmd+S correctly saves draft in a compose window.
- Avoid problems with flowing in headers included in forwarded messages.
- Fixed daylight savings time offset problems in Opera Mail.
Newsfeeds
- Newsfeed reader is available without activating e-mail client. Separate "Feeds" entry added to main menu when first newsfeed subscription is activated.
- Support for and auto-detection of Atom newsfeeds.
- Newsfeed icon displayed inside address field when newsfeeds are linked from a page. Click to subscribe.
- Improved detection of HTML content in newsfeed items.
- Default time between checks for newsfeed updates set to 3 hours.
Security
- Added whitelist of safe top-level domains for IDN.
- TLDs are considered safe if they have implemented anti-homographic character policies or otherwise limited the available set of characters to prevent spoofing. Only a single script or specific combinations are allowed in each label (separated by "." or "-").
- The current whitelist contains the following top-level domains: no, jp, de, se, kr, tw, cn, at, dk, ch, and li.
- The list is colon-separated and included in Opera 8 Preferences. It is updated automatically in the Opera version check.
- Domain names from other top-level domains that contain characters outside Latin 1 will be displayed in punycode, an encoding syntax designed for use with IDNA, specified in RFC3492.
- Improvement to IDNA handling. Script detection now allows more IDNs to be displayed in Unicode. .
- Switching from IDN whitelisting to blacklisting can be done by adding a '~' as the first character in the string, that is, "~:com:tw:".
- Learn more about this security issue and Opera's response in our security advisory.
- Let JavaScript prompt dialogs contain the name of the originating server, addressing vulnerability reported in Secunia Advisory 15488.
- Fix for variant of window injection vulnerability reported in Secunia Advisory 13253
- Fixed information disclosure weakness causing file path information to be sent when using the GET form method. Security Focus Bugtraq ID #12723.
- Added small, yellow security bar displayed inside the address field when visiting a site using security protocols.
- The padlock icon is now displayed when the protocol is HTTPS, regardless of security state.
- An open padlock is displayed if the HTTPS site is considered insecure.
- The organization name from the certificate is displayed in the security bar.
- Added support for the Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP) -- real-time requests for certificate status.
- Added security dialog launched when clicking padlock icon in address field.
- SSLv2 and 40-bit encryption are enabled by default again, as they are required for some sites to function properly.
- Show warning triangle when asking user to allow full permissions to a signed Java applet.
Printing
- Form elements are now printed correctly.
- Printing through JavaScript window.print() fixed.
- Background images will now be printed by default.
Documentation
- Help documents are now on line, still accessible from the menu or by pressing Cmd+?. Operator Cache functionality stores help pages locally as they are viewed.
- Implemented in-line error pages that replace most error dialogs.
- Help files and error pages have the CSS signatures "opera-help" and "opera-error".
Mac OS X integration
- Added ability to check spelling in Opera Mail, textareas and multi-line form fields, based on the system spelling checker (no install required).
- Wand integration with Keychain discontinued.
- Native skin more compliant with Apple HIG.
- Native skin icons now have the necessary transparency. Image transparency problems on Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) solved.
- Now using regional settings from Mac OS X to display dates and times in Opera Mail.
- Respect "Full keyboard access" system setting.
- Added Mac encodings "macintosh", "x-mac-ce", "x-mac-cyrillic", "x-mac-greek" and "x-mac-turkish" to list of known encodings.
Miscellaneous
- Added automated weekly check for updated versions of Opera. May be performed manually by going to .
- Enabled downloading of the file ua.ini for site-specific changing of the user agent string. Check is performed automatically with the "Check for new version" function.
- Multiple stability and performance improvements.
- Sent e-mail can now be imported.
- Allow redirect URLs to be loaded from cache, improving offline browsing.
- Solved problems with URLs passed to Opera from external applications.
- Now correctly handling anchors in URLs for PDF files.
- Fixed issue where opening PDF files when having the file type setting "open with default application" would launch a terminal window.
- Fixed problem where typed URL opened in a background page.
- Solved issue with downloading via FTP to directory where file with identical name existed.
- Multiple IME fixes.
- Improved font selection for Korean, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.
- '$' in searches now works as intended.
More Information