A+ Ajax

Rick Waldron has detailed the SharedWorker support that Opera has added in 10.6 beta (and has been available in Safari 5 and Chrome 5).

Web Workers are fantastically simple. Simple message passing. No thread locks and semaphores and craziness. However, not being able to share a thing as a constraint is painful, and a nice addition to the spec is the notion of a SharedWorker:

Instead of a single message processing function, workers can attach multiple event listeners, each one performing a quick check to see if it is relevant for the message. If multiple authors wanted to collaborate using a single port to communicate with a worker, it would allow for independent code instead of changes having to all be made to a single event handling function.

To get the Gist of it, Rick put together some GitHub goodness to exemplify the new world:

Basic HTML page for running the test:

The HTML page called in the iframe:

The Renderer (that’s your browser window)

The SharedWorker

This demonstrates how we can connect two different pages to the same SharedWorker process, and track our connections to them from one persistent object variable. Very exciting!

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The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.

WebM is an open, royalty-free, media file format designed for the web.

WebM defines the file container structure, video and audio formats. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska container.

It happened. Today, Google is up on stage at I/O unveiling a new WebM project alongside a slew of partners (notably: Mozilla and Opera on the browser side) that gets the On2 codec out into the open. This is huge news for the fight for Open Video, and everyone will now have eyes on Safari and IE. Microsoft posted a month back about their stance, probably to get it out before this announcement. If folks don’t support this….. it is weak.

YouTube will be a huge push here, and you can go to their html5 version: http://www.youtube.com/html5 and check it out. Today it is available in trunk builds on Chromium and Firefox. Soon, an Opera beta, Chrome dev release, and more.

The project is going after:

• Openness and innovation. A key factor in the web’s success is
  that its core technologies such as HTML, HTTP, and TCP/IP are open
  for anyone to implement and improve. With video being core to the
  web experience, a high-quality, open video format choice is needed.
  WebM is 100% free, and open-sourced under a
  BSD-style license.

• Optimized for the web. Serving video on the web is different
  from traditional broadcast and offline mediums. Existing video
  formats were designed to serve the needs of these mediums and do
  it very well. WebM is focused on addressing the unique needs of
  serving video on the web.

  • Low computational footprint to enable playback on any device,
    including low-power netbooks, handhelds, tablets, etc.*

  • Simple container format

  • Highest quality real-time video delivery

  • Click and encode. Minimal codec profiles, sub-options; when
    possible, let the encoder make the tough choices.

* Note: The initial developer preview releases of browsers supporting WebM are not yet fully optimized and therefore have a higher computational footprint for screen rendering than we expect for the general releases. The computational efficiencies of WebM are more accurately measured today using the development tools in the VP8 SDKs. Optimizations of the browser implementations are forthcoming.

Congrats Open Web.

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The Opera team has released 10.50 for Mac and along with it some impressive performance numbers:

• Stabilization Improvements: You will find that this build is much more stable than the pre-alpha build.
• More polished user interface: The whole UI is more polished now. We’re still not done yet, and expect more polishes and improvements in the builds to come.
• Opera Unite: Opera Unite now works with this release. You can browse through and download unite apps through the Unite Apps Repository.
• HTML5 <video>: This beta now supports the html5 <video> tag.
• Widgets as standlone apps: We’ve already talked about widgets as standalone apps, but this functionality was till now, only available in windows builds. Now even in this build of 10.50 beta for mac, you can use widgets as standalone apps. Check out this ODIN post by Patrick Lauke on standalone widgets for more information.
• New Developer Tools Menu: You can go to ‘View->Developer Tools’ Menu to access common and usefull tools for developers, such as Opera Dragonfly, cache information, the error console, the source code of the page, and more.

Gregg Keizer talks about the performance side of things

According to tests run by Computerworld, Opera 10.5 was nearly 15% faster than Safari for Windows and almost 20% faster than Google’s Chrome, the previous No. 1 and No. 2 browsers. Opera’s preview was more than twice as fast as Mozilla’s Firefox 3.6, over eight times faster than Opera 10.10, and 10 times faster than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 (IE8).

We tend to talk a lot about WebKit, Moz, and IE…. congrats to the Opera team on their impressive work.

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Built using the open web standards you know and love, Opera Dragonfly’s source is available to view. Not only that, but it is released on a open source BSD license, meaning it is free as in freedom as well as in beer.

Opera is normally one of the few browsers that isn’t open source, but they are certainly doing more with open source itself. David Storey has announced how Opera Dragonfly has joined the open source ranks.

There is Dragonfly itself, but also the Scope protocol:

Starting today, Opera Dragonfly is a fully open source project, hosted on BitBucket. Since the previous version of Opera Dragonfly, a lot of work has gone on behind the scenes replacing the existing architecture with a modern version of the Scope Protocol – STP-1. Opera Dragonfly has been rewritten to use this faster and more efficient version of Scope. Now that we believe that the underlying protocol is stable and performant, and a public desktop build has been released with this included, it is time to put Opera Dragonfly on a public Mercurial repository.

If you have a Mercurial client you can visit the Opera Dragonfly STP-1 repository and check out the source code. We have provided initial documentation in the Wiki to get you started. This is Opera’s first full open source project, so there will be a learning curve. We ask you to bear with us while we get everything up and running and policies in place. Coming from a closed source background there are some hurdles to overcome, such as the current bug tracking system being on a closed server. We hope to migrate to an open bug tracking system as the project gets on its feet.

As well as the current and previous versions of the Opera Dragonfly source code, we have released a couple of tools to help with Opera Dragonfly development. The first is Dragonkeeper. This is a standalone proxy, which translates STP (Scope Transport Protocol) to HTTP. This can also be useful for remote debugging. The second tool is Hob. Hob is a utility to create code from Protocol Buffer descriptions. Protocol Buffers are one of the formats Scope STP-1 supports along with JSON and XML.

Nice. The question is…. will others implement on STP so we can get cross browser support.

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