I didn't actually click your (previous) link, I just read what you said...
...and we don't know when Opera created this design, specially because they just didn't announce anything as far as I know, just the pre-alpha build for users to try it out and see the new design by themselves on daily use.
Still, Opera was the first browser to support HTML5 and HTML5 audio and video, and is now the first to offer WebM, besides of course also having been the first to officially release the final browser build with this design.
First browser to support WebM indeed was Opera, but first browser to fully support HTML 5 will be Internet Explorer 9 [ref. 2].
At same time, Opera is pretty poor at protecting user from malware, which makes Opera teams' claims that it's 'safest' browser
on the earth totally invalid - check reference 1, a document made by totally independent security testing company.
And what's most surprising, first browser to feature hardware acceleration for SVG, canvas and font rendering,
and to follow all HTML 5, CSS 3 and ECMAScript standards properly is... Internet Explorer 9 again [reference 2].
Looks like Microsoft finally understood that they should follow standards, and that's good news for web developers.
Internet Explorer 9 will also (most likely) be fastest browser at time of it's release - even third alpha beats such
products as Firefox 3.6, Safari 5, Opera 10.53 (possibly Chrome 5 too, haven't checked that one).
Err... Safari in Windows and OSX is hardware accelerated now as well. OSX is more accelerated.. font rendering always has been.. and Canvas I believe was added with Safari 5.
The file (in windows atleast.. in OSX it's built into the OS) that handles the Hardware acceleration, is QuartzCoreInterface.dll... That's the implementation Apple chose.. they ported the Quartz graphics library over to Windows.
Also, just becasuse Google said WebM is going to be a standard, doesn't make it so. The issue with all of these video codecs, is they're all encumbered with patents. Only difference between h.264 and Ogg/WebM is that H.264, the patents are known, and the MPEG LA are a body that holds the patents and says they do. Who's to say that with Ogg/WebM.. that once Opera, IE, FF implement them... and they gain a foothold in use.. that the patent trolls don't come out from their bridge and sue FF and Opera and Microsoft into the ground for patent infringement. Not to mention that Ogg and WebM are inferior codecs not only on desktop platforms, but mobile platforms as well. WebM and Ogg don't have hardware accellerated decoding.. which means on mobile platforms they either suck battery and/or are slow as shit. H.264 is common enough that most phones support hardware acceleration (atleast the decent ones).. which means that playbac is smooth and saves battery life.. the 2 important things on mobile platforms.
No idea about Mac version, but Windows version is a bit slower than IE 9 (still faster than Chrome, Firefox and Opera, tho).
I agree here, but if YouTube will switch YouTube's HTML5 version to WebM-only, all browsers will be forced to support it in order not to lose audience.
Just leaving this here as proof of H.264 being superior:
No. If YouTube decides to play their monopoly and enforce WebM which they won't, as all YT's videos are stored in H.264 anyways, for the YouTube application on the iPhone, along with it's their way to support Android OS and such. So I doubt that they'd be "only WebM".
Speed in browsers as well is so ****ing drawn out as a big deal anyways, it's insignificant. The differences are in the milliseconds for most operations (for everything that isn't IE8 or Firefox).. it's just stupid. Hardware Acceleration is good, but only because trying to draw things in a software renderer is slow.. as learnt by every game developer ever. JS performance is so ****ing close that it doesn't even matter.
If you notice.. I group Firefox in with IE8 in terms of JS performance as Firefox just doesn't even compare.
IE9 isn't goign to be the end all of the universe. It's fantastic that Microsoft are seeming to give a proper try at creating a standards compliant browser, however it's still too early to see if IE9 will have the rendering glitches that IE8 and IE7 have. Mostly to do with the box model and such. IE8 still dropped the ball sometimes, but was a lot better than IE7, and well IE6.. Nobody speaks of IE6.
Except "displaying properly" is simply not just about passing tests... It's also about its behaviour when presented with an HTML page with CSS. IE8 didn't do that bad.. IE7 was still bad.. IE6 was terrible.
Supporting something is great.. but rendering its behaviour correctly, and consistently with other browsers is more important.
How so? A forum is for discussing topics. We are discussing a topic. Hell, we're not even flaming eachother, I haven't even called E.Reiljans a Microsoft dick-sucking whore for his inferrence that IE9 is going to be better than everything.
... Why? Becuase they decided to exploit Windows specific things to get stuff done well? The thing about Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera.. is they can't just go "Oh guis, we'll just render this browser stuff as a ****ing DirectX game" (which basically is their strategy)... Everyone else has to go "So, we haffto make this work with OpenGL, Quartz (Using Mac-Specific API features are faster/easier than directly with OGL).. and then DirectX as well?! Not to mention that Microsoft has the most experience with web browsers.
All this acceleration stuff isn't the main importance, as Canvas and SVG won't be used as a principal featureset even on IE's release, as they are to be used for niche things, or tech demos.
The thing that really will matter to web developers is "Does IE9 render pages identical to Webkit/Gecko"... If IE9 doesn't, then it's failed. Sure it does a lot of shiny random things.. but those shiny things don't get used by web developers. They get used for tech demos for 10 years until everyone supports them.
Oh and for the record, I use FF currently, but used Opera for a long period of time because I liked the GUI, but FF is great because of the endless amount of addons, although I think (for me) Opera was/is slightly faster.
I understand that, and I can't judge something that's not been released yet, but going on old versions of IE, I will most likely not even try IE9 unless I hear it's amazing/quick etc, I've never liked the GUI of IE, the main reason I'm using FF though is because it's quick and has the addons but in terms of speed and GUI I think Opera wins for me.
Edit: Added 11 Browsers benchmarks in terms of speed on Windows OS.
Also a link to browser speeds for Mac and Windows here
Guess I'll have to test it when it arrives, testing out Safari at the moment, seems OK but a bit slow on start-up, but I like the GUI on the start-up it's a bit similar to Opera's.
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