Opera switching to WebKit+V8

Opera has decided to switch to using WebKit and V8 for for all new products. First they'll start with a product for smartphones (since as they say, many mobile-facing sites are only/best tested on WebKit anyway), and then Opera Desktop and other products will follow.

By my count, that leaves us with three major rendering engines (WebKit, Gecko, and Trident), and three major JavaScript engines (V8, SpiderMonkey, and JScript). Well, you could perhaps argue that there are two JScripts (the really broken one in IE8 and earlier, and the much better and completely rewritten one in IE9 and later), but let's not quibble.

Amazon S3 Adds Root Domain Support

More interesting news from Amazon: Now S3 supports static website hosting on the root of your domain. So in addition to http://www.example.com you can now have http://example.com. This comes warm on the heels of their having added CORS support in August and redirections in October. The directon is fairly clear, eh?

S3 Adds CORS Support

Some interesting news today: Amazon's S3 now supports CORS, the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing standard. This means that in addition to storing your images, stylesheets, and JavaScript files in S3 as you might be now, you can now also store any static data or templates you want to retrieve via ajax there, assuming your user is using a browser that supports CORS (all modern ones do, one way or another). This isn't a game-changer, there were ways to do this anyway (basically embedding those resources in JavaScript files a'la JSONP), but it just got a bit easier...