Opera Next Updates Core Rendering Engine

It’s a big Friday for Opera, as they released a new version for Opera Next (the pre-alpha release of the browser), with an updated Presto, the core rendering engine, to version 2.9.22, which carries some serious improvements.

The current Opera Next, build 1085, is the first one to feature Ragnarök, Opera’s own implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm. This has implications as far as interoperability issues are concerned when accessing a website from different browsers.

Another important modification concerns CSS3 gradients, which have been improved by adding support for radial gradients. This is good news for web developers as they’ll be able to change the colors quicker and thus produce much more flexible gradients.

Translated to the regular user, this means that we’ll benefit from prettier websites that render the content fairly the same on different browsers.