Prototype 1.6 & Opera

Posted in Web

Prototype 1.6.0.2 was released last week. It’s a bugfix and performance release, naturally, but for the first time Prototype boasts official support for Opera 9.25 and higher.

For a while we’ve supported Opera on a casual basis — we’d try to fix bugs reported against Opera, but we’d let small test failures slide. Call it C‐grade browser status.

But Opera 9 isn’t a C‐grade browser, especially not where JavaScript is involved. Opera features a lightning‐fast JavaScript engine and supports broad swaths of DOM Level 3. (It even has preliminary support for parts of HTML5, like Web Forms 2.) So we’ve made the necessary adjustments to ensure all tests pass in Opera.

We specify 9.25 because that’s the latest stable version. Earlier versions might pass all tests, but I admit I do not feel compelled to download older point releases and find out for sure. If you have an older release of Opera 9, you may run into problems of a minor nature.

Opera 9.5 is in beta, and though we can’t guarantee support for 9.5 until it sees a final release, I can assert that all the tests pass in the latest beta.