Most of the big Preview 2 features are already getting a lot of attention in employee blogs. There are, however, a couple new things not getting a lot of attention that deserve a special mention:
Spatial navigation improvements
Spatial navigation is a quick way of navigating forms and links on web pages. Hold down Shift and use the arrow keys on your keyboard to jump to the nearest link or form element.
This worked reasonably well before, but could run into problems with certain form elements. Since form elements were automatically focused by spatial navigation, you could get trapped if you focused a TEXTAREA, for instance. To solve this, you must now press Enter when navigating to form elements to give them focus. There's a black border drawn around the currently selected form element, to help with orientation. I use spatial navigation a lot and find it much more comfortable to use with this change.
Unselect
"But Tim," you say, "how do I get out of a focused form element so I can get back to spatial navigation?" Well, that's easy. Just press ESC. This nifty little addition also works when you have text selected. So, say you have a link selected, but you want to scroll the page using Space. No problem. Just press ESC and you're on your way.
For tweakers, this change was done by adding the new command "Deselect all" to the ESC key definition.
display: inline on TABLE
About a month ago, I wrote about problems with the rich text editing toolbar at Gmail. After my post, I got an e-mail from a CSS WG member, stating that the next public draft of the CSS2.1 spec. would change the handling of display: inline on TABLE elements. In anticipation of that change, Preview 2 was updated to take these rules into account. Now, when display: inline is used on a TABLE, an anonymous table element will be created and set to display: inline-table. Thus, now the Gmail rich text editing toolbar is displaying as it should.
Improved message headers
Screenshot of old message headers
Message headers were previously displayed using HTML and CSS. Unfortunately, the display was very inconsistent, since headers in e-mails aren't in a specific order. To counter this, we added toolbars to handle message header display. Now, your message's subject, date/time, sender, recipient, and attachments will always appear in the same order. You can easily add, remove, or reorder headers by right-clicking on the toolbar and clicking Customize.
Screenshot of new message headers
The new message header toolbars also give us the added ability to add some new functionality to messages. For instance, you can now save all attachments to a message by clicking the Save button on the Attachments line of the toolbar. Additionally, each attachment name is a button, giving you quick access to Open, Save as, and Save to desktop. Executable files are blacklisted, showing a warning dialog if you try to open them.
Each name and e-mail address in a message is also a button. Clicking it gives you the option to copy the e-mail address, compose a new e-mail to the address, and add the address as a contact. If the e-mail address is already associated with a contact, you'll be able to show the contact's view ("Read mail") and change the contact properties (rather than adding a new contact). If the recipient of an e-mail ("To") is a contact, their e-mail address will not be shown. We're still debating this change, so feel free to post your feedback about it.
The old HTML/CSS headers are still available, if you prefer them. Enabling them is a two step process:
- Go to opera:config and disable the User Prefs|Show Mail Header Toolbar setting.
- Open the message stylesheet, mime.css (found in the Styles sub-directory of the Opera program directory), and remove the following CSS rule:
div.headers {visibility:hidden;height:0;}.
When you select your next message, the HTML/CSS headers will appear.
OPML import/export
More and more sites are adding RSS and Atom feeds, allowing you to keep up-to-date with new content without visiting every day. Now, with our new OPML support, it's much easier to import your feeds to Opera from another program or move feeds between Opera installations. To import/export your feed list, go to File > Import and export to choose the correct operation.
CSS3 opacity
By popular request, we've added CSS3 opacity support, which allows page designers to make semi-transparent elements on their pages. Typical uses are slick visual transformations, though I'm sure there are other valid uses. Shortly after adding opacity support in internal builds, I surfed to a web page I'd been visiting frequently and noticed some new effects. A bit of investigation proved they were using opacity, though I never knew I was missing anything. That's what I call graceful fallback. It isn't much of a difference, but opacity can add some nice touches to otherwise static pages.
