Development Starts on Next Opera 10.5x

The fourth minor update for Opera 10.50 is now being built, with an early preview release having been available for download as of May 5th, 2010. Early adopters looking to test-drive the next refresh to Opera can grab version 10.54 Build 3383 Beta and take the release out for a spin. Of course, as all other Opera development snapshots, Build 3383 of v10.54 is not designed to be run into production environments, but only for testing. Users that are not familiar with the risks associated with running pre-release software should stick to Opera 10.53, which was launched last week, at the end of April 2010.

“Here it is: your Wednesday snapshot with lots of added awesomeness and fixes,” Daniel Aleksandersen, from the Opera Desktop Team, revealed. And fact is that testers will get nothing more than the next minor update to Opera 10.5x. In this sense, the focus continues to be placed on resolving issues that survived past the previous releases. At the same time, Opera Software is looking for feedback on the latest build.

“We are mostly interested in regressions,” Aleksandersen said. “Meaning: something that worked in the previous snapshot but stopped working because of some changes we made in this snapshot. Everything else is better handled through a detailed bug report on https://bugs.opera.com/wizard/ or bounced off other users in the forums. We cannot fix everything at once (obviously) but we will prioritize fixing recent regressions. Then [we] will get on to new features and other bugs from our bug database as developer time is made available.”

The week of May 3rd has been extremely busy for all browser makers. Not only did Opera Software release Opera 10.54 Build 3383, but Microsoft, Mozilla and Google also delivered new versions of their respective browsers. Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 has been available for download as of May 5th, as has been a new Beta of Firefox 3.6.4 and of Google Chrome 5.0.

The latest release of Opera 10.54 for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome 5.0 Beta for Windows is available for download here.