List of things that broke with the Opera 15 release due to the switch to Blink/Chromium (Web features, not UI-specific stuff)

opera-15-regressions.md

List of features that are supported by Opera 12 but not by Opera 15 due to the switch to Blink/Chromium:

• xhr.responseType = 'json' fixed as of August 19, 2013
• Link HTTP header
• Link HTTP header for stylesheets specifically
• Pressing Enter when an element with tabindex has focus should trigger a click
• Fragment identifiers in data: URIs should be handled correctly
• CSS gradients with transparency
• Accurate SVG rendering
• <img src=foo.svg> where foo.svg is an SVG file that contains text looks terrible
• Support colors with alpha in SVG stop elements and feFlood
• (Partial) IDNA 2008 support
• The object-fit and object-position CSS properties
• Unprefixed CSS transforms
• DOM attributes should be moved to prototype chains and should expose JavaScript getters/setters
• Protection against regular expression DOS

Painfully broken SVG rendering on many different levels. Opera had probably the best (and certainly the earliest) rock-solid SVG implementation. Webkit had the arguably the worst, barring IE.

Opera Next reproduces all of Chromium's problems, as far as I can tell. I actually see this as a positive opportunity, to the extent that the (remaining) Opera engineers can hopefully help fix the litany of failing SVG layout tests that webkit historically never prioritized. Here's just one glaring recent Chromium bug ticket as a taste:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=259971

These features are on the cusp of actually being usable in production. Personally I would trade five bleeding-edge features landing in just one browser, for having bulletproof SVG in all modern browsers.

Pre-Blink Opera does support (a subset) of IDNA 2008. Chromium started working on it some time ago, but progress is stalled currently.

Bug: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=61328

Object-fit was responsive designer's dream: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/css3-object-fit-object-position/

• Keyboard shortcuts (in comparison to the best javascript extensions I found for Chrome and Firefox)
• HTML element aware (e.g. I can have one-key shortcuts, since they will always work in the text boxes as expected)
• macros, possibility to 'and' and 'or' commands (e.g. a 'switching' shortcut, open a dialog with pre-checked checkboxes)
• available commands (browser core commands alongside with javascript bookmarklets)

<li>Page cycler</li>

<li>Sessions</li>

<li>Site preferences</li>

<li>Styles</li>
<ul>
    <li>Unlike Stylish</li>
    <ul>
        <li>can be based on an imported css file</li>
        <li>can be edited in an editor</li>         
    </ul>
    
    <li>Unlike one-file Chrome and Firefox user css</li>
    <ul>
        <li>can be page-specific and based on an imported file at the same time without using a preprocessor</li>
    </ul>
    <li>Unlike both</li>
    <ul>
        <li>can be turned off/on or switched using shortcuts</li>
    </ul>
</ul>

If you cannot imagine a use-case for the shortcut features, I control the whole browser (tab switch/cycle/close/new, page scroll/jump, spatial navigation, nav. forward/backward, get last closed tabs, open a link in a new tab/window) by ONE HAND (without breaking it).

I'm also using an eye-saving dark css as a general style, but, since it's omptimized for text by disabling most of the images (e.g. background imgs of links that have also text), I have to switch/disable it to get sense of navigation on page and then get it back imidiately.

• Configurable Keyboard Shortcuts
• Minimalistic UI (was easy to realize in Opera 12)

The menu bar.

Support for CSS3 transformations without using vendor prefixes.

+ Old Opera rendered repeating gradients in a nice proper way, webkit/blink have a lot of problems with this — http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2012/05/30/repeating-linear-madness/

Opera Blink doesn't have XMLHttpRequest.prototype.response, Opera Presto has it.

@mzgol Apparently not: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=332096#c3