14 DAY TRIAL // Opera has been shifting gears in recent months and is releasing new versions of its powerful yet unappreciated browser at a pace to rival Google Chrome. With Opera 10.60, touted as the fastest release ever, barely out the door, developers are wasting no time and work on its successor, Opera 10.70, is well underway.
A new development snapshot of the upcoming version has just been released and Opera has also taken the opportunity to clarify any confusion caused by the parallel development of both 10.61 and 10.70.
The latest snapshot, Opera 10.70, build 3468 on Windows, focuses on improvements to the web rendering engine, dubbed Presto. There are a few new features introduced, HTML5 HashChangeEvent; CSS3 image-fit and image-position; Selection.selectAllChildren; and OnAboutToLoadUrl(). It also comes with a long list of bug fixes on all platforms. You can check out the release announcement for the full change log.
Along with the shorter release cycle, Opera is borrowing something else from the Google Chrome team, a confusing numbering scheme. At this point, there are three separate branches, the Opera 10.60 stable build, 10.61 RC2 which is labeled as a bug-fixing release and the development build labeled as 10.70. Still, it’s nowhere near as confusing as Chrome which, with the new Canary Builds, comes in five different flavors.
“[W]e are testing the 10.61 release, and 10.70 in parallel, which may cause some confusion if you look at build numbers. The most recent 10.61 build may have a higher build number than the latest 10.70 build, but that is simply the number assigned to them by the build system. Opera ‘10.70’ is still the main development branch, while 10.61 is only intended to be a smaller security/bug fix release,” Opera explained.
Opera 10.70 build 3468 for Windows is available for download here. Opera 10.70 build 6416 for Linux is available for download here. Opera 10.70 build 8414 for Mac is available for download here.