14 DAY TRIAL // At the end of May 2010, after a period of quiet, Opera Software released the first Alpha development milestone for the next version of its browser. Just a few days later, a new release of the Alpha snapshot for Opera 10.60 is available for download, introducing a number of changes, if compared with the original Build. Early adopters that have already played around with the initial Build 3400 of Opera 10.60 will notice that the latest release, Build 3402, is less buggy, after the Norwegian browser maker dealt with a few issues affecting Opera.
“But users need to keep in mind that Opera 10.60 is still very much a pre-release variant of Opera 10.50’s successor, and, as such, it should not be deployed into production. “This is a development snapshot of Opera. It is released for testing purposes, and there may be serious bugs and unfinished features,” Ruari Ødegaard, from the Opera Desktop team, revealed.
Opera 10.60 Alpha Build 3402 now plays nice with Google Earth links opened from websites and with Flash games on Facebook. In addition, Opera Software introduced a number of performance and plug-in improvements that should made the browser faster and more reliable. “Here is a new build for all platforms with a few nice core fixes since the 10.60 Alpha release. Give them a test and tell us what you think. With a bit of hard work on our part, a few more desktop specific fixes should be on their way to you soon,” Ødegaard added.
The first Opera 10.60 Alpha was released at the start of this week, with Opera Software touting a range of bug fixes to improve stability, but also performance enhancements, and tweaks to the graphical user interface. In terms of the speed improvements, the focus with Opera 10.60 is to boost the performance of JavaScript, DOM and CSS, according to the browser maker.
Opera 10.60 Alpha 1 for Windows is available for download here.