The Good Life... a weblog about life, technology, and the Opera Web browser

Despite the reports, we have not yet decided if we will change the default browser identification to Opera in the next release (or any release after that). We are doing public testing at this point. That's it.

Saying that, we're now in a better position than ever to fight sites that discriminate based on browser ID. In Opera 8.0, we introduced site-specific browser ID overrides, Browser JavaScript, and User JavaScript. These are all excellent tools to improve the Opera experience.

Public testing of the new browser ID default has been very successful. We've received excellent feedback from our users about sites that don't work when IDing as Opera. Please head over to our forums and tell us your experience IDing as Opera. The more users we hear from, the better.

As many of you have undoubtedly noticed, 8.01 Final (build 7642) doesn't include the fix for rows 10 and 11 I previously wrote about. As we started the 8.01 Final release process the first time (with build 7624), several users reported display regressions (including, ironically, problems at some Mozilla sites). Due to these display regressions and other reported regressions, we decided to halt the release.

After we investigated the display regressions, we found that they all had a common source: the fix for rows 10 and 11 in the Acid2 test. We reviewed the fix, found that it was wrong, and reverted it. Implementing the correct fix was deemed too risky, thus 8.01 Final was released without the fix.

The rendering with this fix reverted is the same as in build 7597:

PS: I've added a category specifically for Acid2 posts on my site.