14 DAY TRIAL // A new development snapshot of Opera 10.70 is now available for download featuring support for a web technology which enables real time communications between multiple users across the web. Essentially, Opera Software is now unveiling the first testing Build of the next iteration of Opera designed to play nice with Web Sockets.
The promise from the Norway-based browser vendor is that the final release of Opera 10.70 will feature full support for Web Sockets.
For the time being, early adopters and developers can download Opera 10.70 Build 9067 and test drive the Web Sockets implementation offered with the development snapshot.
“Here is a new snapshot with a Core update featuring our first implementation of Web Sockets, and an improved Unite and Widgets implementation. (No UI changes.) Watch out for Unite and Widgets regressions,” revealed Daniel Aleksandersen, from the Opera Desktop team.
“This specification defines an API that enables Web pages to use the WebSocket protocol for two-way communication with a remote host,” reads the abstract of the specification from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
As Aleksandersen noted, there are additional enhancements offered for testing with the advent of the Opera 10.70 Build 9067.
On top of the improvements, Opera Software has also labored to provide fixes for a number of bugs impacting versions of Opera 10.70 for all supported platforms.
“WebSockets provide a way to communicate between script in a Web page and the server in full-duplex mode with low latency,” Opera Software’s Simon Pieters stated.
“Before people have tried to fake bidirectional communication using XMLHttpRequest, but this is slow since it needs to set up a new TCP connection for each message."
“WebSockets sets up one TCP connection and confirms that the server can speak WebSocket by doing a special handshake, after which the server and the client can send text messages over the connection at will, resulting in faster communication."
“This enables applications and games that have multiple users interacting real-time (such as Quake) to run natively in the browser without plugins, with good performance.”
Opera 10.70 Build 9067 is available for download here.