Opera Border Radius in 2010?

Opera has been maybe the most standards-conscious brow­ser over its life­time. This has resul­ted in frus­tra­tion among users, who believe it to be “bro­ken” because it doesn’t ren­der lazy code correctly — code that takes advan­tage of the for­gi­ve­ness of other brow­sers, allo­wing you to write slop­pily and get away with it.

But it has also resul­ted in frus­tra­tion among web deve­lo­pers, who are impa­tient at Opera’s reluc­tance to adopt any stan­dards that haven’t been laser-etched into pla­ti­num tablets down in the W3C’s base­ment foundry. Among them is the border-radius pro­perty, an effect that will pro­bably be out of vogue any­way by the time Opera’s Presto engine imple­ments it. Of course, since CSS3 has been kic­ked around the W3C offi­ces since 1999, and border-radius itself since 2001, most other engi­nes (Gecko, Web­Kit, KHTML) stop­ped wai­ting and began inven­ting their own pro­per­ties for this effect. Presto has not.

In the course of remin­ding myself of this lamen­ta­ble fact by searching for wor­ka­rounds today, I noti­ced that some Opera deve­lo­pers are casually drop­ping hints that the full-blown, unqua­li­fied, W3C-crafted border-radius itself has made an appea­rance in Presto 2.3, and that the next ver­sion of Opera will be powe­red by 2.4.

It’s all true, I saw it on Twit­ter.