Say hello to Safari 3.0 and Opera 9.5 (Kestrel)

After a couple months of extensive research, today I’m excited to share about one of our goals for 2008 R1. Our research so far indicates that we will be able to support Safari 3.0 (currently in Beta) and Opera 9.5 (currently in Alpha) by early next year. The final version of Safari 3.0 and Opera 9.5 would be available later this year (info from their internal developers) – so by the time we released 2008 R1, both browsers should have been widely adopted by users.

Extending nearly 20 components to support both Safari and Opera at the same time is not an easy task I must say – however thanks to our DOMBridge architecture which allows different DOM/API between browsers to be unified. This results in a robust development and faster results because product-level can use the same codebase which should work on all browsers, as well as better quality (and of course less bugs).

One of our key strength, called Pixel-Perfect Rendering architecture, has been successfully extended to support both Safari and Opera. This means you will see exactly the same box positioning and dimensioning when using any of today’s modern browsers.

The following screenshots demonstrate Pivot Charting UI – one of the most advanced feature in WebGrid.

Using Opera 9.5:

Using Safari 3.0:

This new browsers support is one of the most significant leap ahead for our upcoming 2008 R1 platform. Developers and their end users will automatically enjoy this new support after they upgraded their Web apps to 2008 R1 platform later on — without any code changes or any other efforts.

As promised, the complete 2008 roadmap is coming soon — hopefully by this week or next week at the latest. Check back on this blog site periodically for further announcements and dev news.

All the best,
Jimmy.