14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha has been released officially and is now available for download, after the build was leaked in the wild at the end of the past week. What Opera Software is offering early adopters is Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Labs, codenamed Evenes, because it is in fact based on the Evenes branch. Early adopters will be able to download and start test driving the Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha Windows and Mac builds immediately, with the UNIX/Linux yet to be launched. It is important to note that Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha is in no way ready for the general public, but meant for developers, and early adopters comfortable with running code that isn’t finalized, and as such might feature an array of problems and bugs, some quite severe.
“What you’re downloading today is a feature-incomplete and likely unstable development build. Please handle with care, backup your data before you install and do not run in hydroelectric power plants,” revealed Opera’s Roberto Mateu
Opera Software has had a team laboring on the next iteration of Opera over a year before v10.0 was released to the public. According to Huib Kleinhout, from the Opera Desktop Team, the planning and development process for Opera 10.5 was kicked off over 18 months ago. Still, the pre-Alpha version released today is a very early development milestone, designed as a Christmas present from the Norway-based browser maker.
Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha features version 2.5 of the Presto rendering engine, but also the new Carakan JavaScript engine which, even this early in the development process delivers an impressive boost in performance compared to Opera 10.10. The browser also ships with a new graphics library, labeled Vega.
“Carakan is our new JavaScript engine. It’s fast, more than 7x faster in SunSpider than Opera 10.10 with Futhark on Windows (Mac optimization is not as far along)” Mateu stated. “We are now using Presto 2.5, which contains a huge numbers of improvements. It also includes support for CSS3 transitions and transforms, and more HTML5 features like persistent storage. Vega is our new graphics library. It’s currently software based and displays everything you see on-screen. Vega can be hardware accelerated, but as you can see from the complex graphics benchmark in Peacekeeper, we don’t seem to need it yet.”
Users of Windows 7 and Windows Vista will be able to enjoy a more consistent level of integration, when it comes down to the next iteration of Opera. Version 10.5 of the browser, even in pre-Alpha stage, has already been tailored to both Windows 7 and Vista. Integration spans from style and visual changes to the way the platforms’ APIs are being used in order for the UI to display the Windows Aero Glass effect. Users of the latest version of the Windows Client, Windows 7 will be able to leverage advanced functionality including Aero Peek and Jump List that now works in tandem with Opera 10.5 features such as Speed Dials, Tabs, etc. right from the Taskbar.
“You can open a new Private tab or Private window that forgets everything that happened on it once closed,” Mateu added. “Dialog boxes (JavaScript alerts, HTTP authentication, etc.) are now non-modal and are displayed as a page overlay. This allows you to switch tabs or windows while the dialog is still displayed. Similarly, the Password Manager dialog is now anchored at the top of the page won’t block any content as it loads a new page. (…) Both fields have been upgraded in looks and functionality. They can now remember searches, support removing items from history and show results in a better layout.”
Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha for Windows is available for download here. Opera 10.5 pre-Alpha for Mac OS X is available for download here.
