14 DAY TRIAL // Opera Software is undoubtedly a worthy match for Google when it comes down to the pace at which it produces development builds of its browser. Just one day after the delivery of the first post-Beta snapshot, yet another testing release of Opera 10.50 has been made available to testers. Obviously, the Norway-based browser maker is allowing only small windows for testers that want to offer the company feedback on specific releases. In this particular case, early adopters had just a single day to download, install, test drive and offer input on Opera 10.50 Beta Build 3257 ahead of the launch of Build 3260.
“We are focusing a lot on stability at the moment, and have fixed some of the most frequent crash bugs. Keep those crash logs coming, though,” a member of the Opera Desktop team stated. “Our core team has also tweaked class selector matching (CSS) performance a bit (a quick test showed performance gains of up to 20-30% for the specific testcase I used).”
In addition to the work done to resolve various crash issues for the next version of Opera, the browser maker has also introduced a new widgets panel. In fact, Opera Software explains that this is the reason why it hasn’t provided a changelog with the latest release, since the problems addressed were extremely specific.
“This build has a new panel for widgets which allows you to launch and uninstall widgets from within the browser. Widgets will still use the Windows installation system, but it will be much easier to keep track of which widgets you have installed,” the Opera Desktop Team representative added.
Build 3260 continues to be Windows-only at this point in time, with the browser maker having already explained that it considered a priority delivering Opera 10.50 for Microsoft’s operating systems first, and only then for Mac OS X and Linux. “You will have to wait a bit more for Mac and Unix builds due to the work that is being done on those platforms,” the Opera Desktop Team member added.
Opera 10.50 Beta Build 3260 is available for download here.