But not quite here, just to pre-Beta stage

Feb 8, 2010 07:57 GMT  ·  By

The first Beta development milestone of the next iteration of Opera is just around the corner. At the end of the past week, Opera 10.50 Build 3228 became available for download. According to Opera Software, Build 3228 is extremely close to the Official beta build of Opera 10.50, albeit not the fully-fledged Beta just yet. However, early adopters should not be fooled by the pre-Alpha label delivered by the installer of the latest release. Fact is that the Norway-browser maker simply did not modify the label, as Build 3228 is pre-Beta for opera 10.50. Opera Software is currently making headway toward delivering the first Beta milestone for Opera 10.50, and as the company revealed in the past, they are focusing on Windows ahead of anything else.

“We're not there quite yet, but we are close to releasing the official beta version of Opera 10.50 for Windows,” noted a member of the Opera Desktop team. “Please focus mostly on potential showstoppers. If there are any bugs that you believe are important enough to block a beta release, let us know. Take a look at the list of known issues first, though. There likely will be Mac and Unix snapshots next week, but right now we're working overtime to get Windows ready for beta.”

Users must understand that Opera 10.50 pre-Beta Build 3228 is nothing more than a development snapshot of the browser, and that using the release implies inherent risks, including crashes and data loss. Only early adopters familiar with what it means to run pre-release software should install and use Opera 10.50 pre-Beta Build 3228.

Build 3228 is the second snapshot of Opera 10.50 made available to testers at the end of the past week. Just a couple of days ahead of its release, Opera’s Petter Nilsen announced the launch of Build 3222, saying “after staffing up and accelerating the development process, we are now approaching the beta stage on Windows. This build has a number of skin fixes and improvements, a large number of bugfixes, and Opera Unite should be working again.”

With Build 3222, Opera 10.50 brings to the table a functional Opera Unite, again; and introduces fixes for spell checking, but also skin updates, full IPv6 support on Windows and a new feature, dubbed Geolocation. Based on the Geolocation API offered initially in labs build from Opera Labs, the feature leverages the Google Location Services as the backend. In this regard, Nilsen revealed that Opera 10.50 pre-Beta Build 3222 was the first desktop release that comes with Geolocation as a standard.

“Location specific services on the web is not new. Many web sites offer localized services based on your IP address such as "Find a Friend in [your city]". IP address location is typically very inaccurate and cannot be used for more advanced location services,” Nilsen explained. “With the W3C Geolocation API, this changes as the browser is able to provide much more accurate location data to a web site using the additional wifi data from the surrounding wifi endpoints.”

Opera 10.50 pre-Beta Build 3228 for Windows is available for download here.