The impact of a certain infamous meeting a few months is finally being felt. Opera Software has released a snapshot build of their upcoming Opera 12.5 browser, and among other things it adds support for WebKit prefixed CSS properties. If you are wondering why Opera would include support for the WebKit prefix, we need to go back to that meeting a few months back. In a February meeting of the CSS working group, a rather grave concern was brought up. The concern was that an increasing number of websites, especially those developed for mobile platforms are catering to WebKit exclusively, by using only WebKit prefixes. This is a concern because it means that such sites will not work on other browsers even when those browser do support all the features that the site requires. A difficult decision was made, which was that since it is impossible to fix the web, or force it to follow standards, the browsers themselves must adapt, and Mozilla and Opera considered automatically mapping WebKit-prefixed CSS properties to their respective counterparts for that browser. Earlier Opera released an emulator for Opera mobile that included support for WebKit prefixes, so developers could test how WebKit -specific websites work on Opera Mobile. What has been added to Opera isn’t a blanket conversion of -webkit- CSS properties to -o-, but mapping of select commonly abused properties so that the majority of the mobile web starts working on Opera again. These properties include -webkit-box-shadow, -webkit-transform, -webkit-transform-origin, -webkit-border-radius, -webkit-border-top-left-radius, -webkit-border-top-right-radius, -webkit-border-bottom-left-radius, -webkit-border-bottom-right-radius, -webkit-transition, -webkit-transition-delay, -webkit-transition-duration, -webkit-transition-property, and -webkit-transition-timing-function. This isn’t all new with Opera 12.5 though, it also includes support for the Notification Center in OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion”. Support for the Clipboard API has been added along with support for DOM Events Level 3 for keyboard events. Just recently Opera Software has also released a version of Opera with experimental support for the new SPDY protocol. You can find out more about that build and download it from the blog post announcing its availability.
