14 DAY TRIAL // At less than two weeks since the delivery of the first Beta development milestone for Opera 10.50, the second Beta snapshot is now available for download. Today, February 24, 2010, Opera Software started offering early adopters Opera 10.50 Beta 2 for Windows. As was the case since early on in the development process of v10.50, the focus for the next iteration of Opera is to offer the browser version to Windows users first, and only subsequently to Mac OS X and Linux customers. The Norwegian browser maker explained that the development process for Opera 10.50 moves at a much faster pace for Windows compared to Mac and Linux, and this is why users of Microsoft’s proprietary OS will get version 10.50 first.
“Beta 2 contains many significant improvements over the first beta, and we would like to thank everyone who helped us test Opera for your great work! Your invaluable feedback really does make a difference, and it helps us turn Opera into an even better browser,” revealed a member of the Opera Desktop Team.
As far as Windows integration goes, testers will notice that Opera 10.50 Beta 2 Build 3273 has been optimized to play nice with Windows 7. In this context, v10.50 will enable users to take advantage of all the new features of the new Windows 7 GUI, including Aero Glass, Aero Peek and Jump Lists. Of course, Opera 10.50 Beta 2 continues to be in development and as such is not recommended for end users or for deployment in production environments.
Opera enumerated some of the highlights of Opera 10.50 Beta 2, including: “skin work, and tweaked styling of internal pages (opera:* and error pages); improved opera:config; improved overlay authentication dialogs to avoid spoofing; context menu fixes; basic Web Storage user interface; lots of crash fixes and widgets fixes.”
Opera 10.50 Beta 2 for Windows is available for download here.