Opera's CSS Support Rated Best

Receives top ratings for its implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)

Oslo, Norway - Mar. 24, 1999

Opera Software's award-winning browser has yet again received top ratings for its implementation of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).

Opera's support for CSS has been rated better than both Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator in an independent study. CSS is a W3C Recommendation which allows Web designers to describe how Web pages should be presented. Using a simple language, web site developers can achieve sophisticated page designs.

Microsoft Explorer and Netscape Navigator have supported CSS for years, but have often diverged from the W3C Recommendation. WebReview, a newsletter for Web professionals, closely monitors browsers and their support for Web standards. WebReview recently published a thorough analysis of how major browsers support CSS. The browsers were rated on each CSS feature, and when the numbers were totaled, Opera had the highest score.

Webreview's analysis.

WINDOWS95/NT

Navigator 4

38.8% / 27.9%

Explorer 3

22.0% / 16.7%

Explorer 4

70.2% / 68.5%

Opera 3

78.1% / 72.1%

"The results confirm what our users have been reporting," said Jon S. von Tetzchner, CEO of Opera. "Opera is committed to open Web standards. We have demonstrated this commitment by carefully reviewing the W3C specifications and implementing them with the highest regard for the standards."

WebReview's study was created by Eric Meyer, an expert on browsers and cascading style sheets. Meyer is co-author of a CSS1 Test Suite recently published by W3C. "Opera's CSS support is really very impressive, especially given its relative youth. In less than a year, the folks at Opera have gone from no CSS support to a level of CSS1 support which, while it isn't yet perfect, still exceeds anything else I've seen," said Meyer. "More than any other product, Opera has shown that it is possible to create a standards-compliant Web browser which is sophisticated enough to satisfy power users, and is still simple enough for novices to use."