Opera touts extensions in next browser
Opera 11 gets behind concept popularized by rivals Firefox and Chrome, will support add-ons created using Web standards such as HTML5 and JavaScript
Opera Software on Thursday announced that it will add support for extensions to its flagship browser, mimicking the functionality of more popular rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox and Google's Chrome.
Opera 11 will support add-ons created using a variety of Web standards -- including HTML5 and JavaScript -- as well as Opera-specific APIs, or application programming interfaces, said Arnstein Teigene, the company's product manager for desktop add-ons.
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"We've always focused on having a very customized browser," said Teigene in a Thursday interview, "and extensions have been one of the most frequently requested additions from users and developers alike."
Opera 11 will be the first version of the Norwegian-made browser to support extensions. Teigene declined to set a specific launch date for the upgrade, saying only that an alpha preview would be released "sometime soon."
Details for developers interested in writing Opera extensions will be published at the same time, Teigene said.
Other browsers, most notably Firefox -- which last summer boasted that users had downloaded two billion of its add-ons -- have thousands of available extensions. But while Firefox popularized the concept, rivals like Chrome and Apple's Safari also offer feature-adding extensions. Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which still accounts for a majority of the browsers used each month, relies on the company's proprietary ActiveX technology to provide some of the functionality of extensions.
But Teigene argued that Opera wasn't playing catch-up by introducing extensions, and instead pointed out that the company has offered widgets -- small, single-purpose Web applications that run outside the browser -- since the 2006 introduction of Opera 9.
He also touted what he called Opera's "open standards" approach to extensions. "We've always been a keen participant in open standards, including CSS, HTML5, and JavaScript, which is why we're focusing on those for extensions," Teigene said.
Opera's extensions will use HTML5 for rendering content, CSS (cascading style sheets) for formatting, and JavaScript for processing.
Teigene was hesitant to go into details of Opera's extension strategy, saying that many were still in flux. Opera 11's extensions, however, will be offered to users in a gallery or download center, as are those designed to run in Firefox, Chrome, or Safari. And they will be vetted, he said, to provide some modicum of quality control.
"In order to submit an extension, the developer will have to be a registered Opera developer, and we'll go through the code to make sure that there's no malicious stuff in it," Teigene said.
However, he declined to spell out how Opera will ensure that rogue extensions don't slip through the cracks, or whether Opera will be able to remotely uninstall potentially dangerous extensions. Mozilla has employed such a blocklist-based "kill switch" feature several times, most recently last July, as a last-ditch defense against malicious add-ons.
