10 (may be more) Essential Things To Develop On Opera

Below are quick notes that I could take from a presentation by Opera team at Yahoo!

 

• Tools -> Advanced -> Developer Tools: This opens up development utilities very similar to firebug
• You can download web developer extensions from opera website
• Info panel shows information about the current page such as scripts, css, etc
• Reload from cache reloads the page from cache
• X-Forwarded-For HTTP Header: For opera mini and opera turbo the rendering is done on hte server. So do not use IP addresses to detect the location on a server. Instead use the X-Forwared header to detect the location of th user.
• viewport meta tag is used to specify the dimensions of a webpage which was introduced by Apple on iphones. Opera supports this for mobile as well as desktop. Do not use "fixed width" though. For example, use <meta name="viewport" content="device-width"> instead of <meta name="viewport" content="width=320">
• use media queries: you can totally change the layout based on the media queries. Its supported live on Opera (at runtime) whereas you have to reload the page in case of browsers like safari and firefox
• media queries are very powerful to present your page under different resolutions
• use window.opera to detect if its opera browser
• Opera 10 still pretends that its 9.8, so if you check for the Opera version from the User Agent string then you will be treating opera 10 as 9.8 You can use the layout rendering engine Presto version to make this detection if you really need to. The version of rendering engine is different, By the way, they decided to pretend as 9.8 because IIS servers (hail MSFT!) parses only the first digit in the version number and they started treating Opera 10 as Opera 1. This is simply hilarious to me. I will appreciate if they screw MSFT and send the user agent as 10
• marker share for opera: people say its only 1% but its really not. If you do not support you loose a huge user base in european network. This is because european countries has lower network speeds and Opera is optimized to work under this conditions
• Opera has 37% of the market in Russia
• BRIC - Brazil, Russia, India and China are the developing markets in internet space and the next 11 countries

Posted via web from spartaa's posterous