What’s new in Opera development snapshots: 14 July 2011

Woo, we got some dramatic big updates this time! Let's see what's new.

As usual, your Opera Next should already have this update (checking opera:about should give you "Presto/2.9.181 Version/12.00" under Browser Identification).

• 6-7% reduction in memory consumption

  The object model was completely rewritten which increases the overall performance and reduces Carakan’s memory usage! Woo!

• Choose preloading videos

  Opera will now honor the preload attribute on HTML5 video elements. Here is a demo to show how that works (Dev.Opera has some excellent posts on how to use HTML5 video).

• The curse of the 32767px is lifted!

  This is H-U-G-E! Opera's humble origins had enforced a strict rule on how big CSS pixel offsets and dimensions can be (for reducing memory usage), which meant if you had width: 90000px or left: 90000000px (a few of us like to think bigger) in your CSS, Opera will clip it to 32767px. This meant traditional solutions that used a width to set horizontal scrolling, would result in wrapped divs even if you did not want wrapping.

  Fear not, now that is no longer the case. You can set as long a value as you like. If 66666699999em is your lucky number, go for it. Check out this presentation by Anton Kovalyov in current and Next to see the difference.

• Font family fixes

  Some bugs in the parsing of family names were fixed. modernizr.com's before/after is an eloquent expression of these fixes.

• Change viewport via JavaScript

  Shi chuan, Mathias wrote an interesting solution to fix the viewport scaling that occurs when you change the orientation of mobile devices using JavaScript (more context). This did not trigger a re-layout in Opera, which meant the change in layout were never applied. But now it does!

• If you are a frequent user of github, you would find it easier to use, as SSL renegotiations are now more reliable with this snapshot.

• Combining text-align: right/center with negative text-indent introduces scrollbar in overflow container

  This is pretty common on sites that use image replacement with text indentation and a text alignment that is not default triggered unseemly scrollbars. A related issue was the introduction of scrollbars with box shadows. Both of these will no longer happen, yay!

• Box shadow no longer paints incorrectly with a transition

  If you had an element with box shadows, artifacts occurred when the element was moved via transitions. So, expect smoother transitions!

• Having two references to same CSS file, and replacing one, no longer replaces the other

  There was a bug that most obviously shows in entireweb.com, in which replacing one of the duplicate references to a CSS file via JavaScript would replace all occurrences of that CSS file. This is no longer the case.

Please do try it out and let us know if any of these do not work for you, or any other suggestions you might have!