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

It's been almost two months since Tim's Opera Bits v5.0, so let's get into it:

1. Opera Desktop 9.20 was released last week. 9.20 includes Speed Dial, a quick way to access the sites you visit most, and supports a Developer console. See the press release for more details.
2. The final version of the Internet Channel developed by Opera Software for the Nintendo Wii was also released last week. The Wii contains the most advanced rendering engine publicly available from Opera Software. See The Rendering Engine for the Wii for more details.
3. An experimental release of Opera Desktop with video element support is available from the Opera Labs for y'all lucky Windows users. This release has native support for the Ogg Theora video codec, which powers the video element. See the April 13, 2007 post at the Opera Labs for details.
4. Don't like Opera's built-in spelling checker? You've got a few options: OSpell (my pick) and Spell Check for Opera (via Daniel) use Opera's User Javascript feature to implement spelling checks.
5. The Nintendo DS browser developed by Opera Software will be released in the US on June 4, 2007.

That's about it. Got a question you want answered in the next Tim's Opera Bits? Ask away in the comments!

The final version of the Internet Channel developed by Opera Software for the Nintendo Wii was released last week and is available as a free download via the Wii Shop Channel. Our press release includes screenshots, a feature overview, and a tutorial video. And remember, it's only free through the end of June 2007.

The rendering engine used by the Internet Channel is the most advanced rendering engine publicly available from Opera Software. It's newer, less-buggy, and more featureful than the rendering engine in the just released Opera Desktop 9.20. If you recall point #2 from "Tim's Opera Bits v5.0", I explained that Opera 9.20 is using the same rendering engine as 9.0 with only very important bug fixes included. Opera 9.0 stopped taking in regular bug fixes in around June 2006. Since then, all the bug fixes have gone into a code branch for Kestrel, the next major update to the Opera Desktop browser. It may be months before Kestrel is publicly available, but lucky you, the Internet Channel already includes many of the bug fixes and features that will eventually be available in Kestrel!

New to the rendering engine used on the Wii is support for more CSS 3 selectors, partial text-shadow support (colors aren't correct), and many, many bug fixes (including the infamous rounding error on large values). These changes are just a preview of what you can expect from Kestrel. Current internal builds of Kestrel fix the text-shadow problems, implement even more CSS Selectors, and fix even more bugs. There are plenty more nice additions, too.