Just ahead of Christmas, Opera “opened up the gift bag” and made available for download new Alpha builds of Opera 10.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. This after at the start of December 2008, the first Alpha version of Opera 10.0 was released, sporting a variety of improvements. Version 10.0 is designed as the successor for v9.6, which climbed in December all the way up to the 9.63 release. Until this point in time, Opera has failed to provide a timetable for the delivery of 10.0, or any indication for that matter as to when it plans to move into Beta or to release the browser to web, although future milestones will undoubtedly be in 2009.

“A new snapshot is available for you to try out. As usual it includes a lot of fixes and improved features. This is a development snapshot: it contains the latest changes, but may also have severe known issues, including crashes and data loss situations. In fact, it may not work at all. For those of you who want to use autoupdate in every single snapshot release just enable the "Download All Snapshots" setting (opera:config#AutoUpdate),” revealed Espen Sand, a member of the Opera desktop team.

Opera 10.0 Alpha Build 1219 is now available for download. Starting with version 10.0, Opera features a new rendering engine, namely Presto 2.2. The evolution of the browser in terms of web standards support is illustrated with the perfect 100/100 score in the Acid3 test. But of course there are additional enhancements compared to Opera 9.6.

Sand also managed to enumerate the changes introduced with the delivery of Opera 10.0 Alpha Build 1219, “Several backend improvements to autoupdate; made content filter rules with a whitespace at the end work; all languages are now included but not all are completed; made spellchecking work on contenteditable elements; switching between html and plain text mail composition works better now; added option to doubleclick a tab to close it opera:config#UserPrefs|DoubleclicktoCloseTab; fixed crash when undeleting and running a widget; improved stability in the search engine which indexes webpages and mail.”

Opera 10.0 Alpha for Windows is available for download here.

Opera 10.0 Alpha for Linux is available for download here.

Opera 10.0 Alpha for Mac OS X is available for download here.