Tag Archives: browser

URL shortening in Ubiquity for Opera too…

Given the cool recent activity around url shortening in Opera, I thought I could also give my small contribution.

In fact, a url shortening command is missing in Ubiquity for Opera. Or rather, it was missing.

There's a new command, shorten-url, based on bit.ly's API, that allows you, as usual with Ubiquity commands, to shorten the current open tab URL, or shorten any URL you type in the Ubiquity window. Here you can see a screenshot as example:

This new command also uses the amazing ajax-enabling UserJS library by xErath. Another interesting news is that from now on, I'll use YUI Compressor to also ship a minified version of the ubiquity javascript code, that almost halves the size, so that's good, since we're already at ~80kb uncompressed.

As usual, you can download Ubiquity for Opera,
(or the minified version), or go to the Ubiquity for Opera github repository.

Enjoy :-)

Opera 10 and the Microsoft Silverlight plugin

Just in case anyone is wondering…

If you don't know, SilverLight is the Microsoft answer to Flash.
If there's some website that has videos or other content that you want to see but they chose to use SilverLight, not all hope is lost.

Just go to the download page for the SilverLight plugin. If you are using Opera, it will tell you that "This browser is not supported blah blah blah…".

Ignore that bullshit and just download it. Then close Opera and install it.
Be sure to remove any pre-existing version first, or it won't work.

After the installation takes place, reopen Opera and go to the plugins page. You should see the SilverLight plugin already enabled. Congratulations, and welcome to the fantastic world of SilverLight content. :-|

IE8 Beta

Now that I work for Opera Software, I am somewhat more interested in browsers, standards, W3C working groups and so on… We also have a CTO that worked on (invented?) initial CSS specs.
Of course, new things about competitor browsers are immediately subject to discussions and opinions inside Opera.

The breaking news this morning was that Microsoft released a beta version of Internet Explorer 8. But the really surprising thing is that it seems to pass the ACID2 test, and without any doctype-switching or faking trick.

They just seem to have switched to standards-rendering by default.

Seems impossible?
Let's wait for the final, then… :-)