14 DAY TRIAL // A new development snapshot of the second minor update to Opera 10.50 is now available for download. Opera 10.52 Build 3338 was released just moments ago to testers, and, just as the preceding Build, it is also available for Mac OS X and Linux, in addition to Windows. For the most past of the development process of Opera 10.50, this wasn’t the case. Opera Software prioritized the building and release of Opera 10.50 for Windows, promising that the browser versions for other platforms would catch up in time. With the delivery of Opera 10.52, the Norway-based browser maker is laboring to synchronize all variants of Opera.
The new snapshot “only includes Core fixes, so if you are awaiting a specific platform or interface bug to be fixed, then this is not the snapshot that will resolve your specific issue. However, it does fix several bugs relating to connection issues, and although the list of bug fixes is not long it should fix a number of seemingly unrelated networking problems (including the dreaded ‘Waiting for DNS’ issue). So if you were having connection issues then this is the build you have been waiting for,” Ruari Ødegaard, from the Opera Desktop team, revealed.
For the time being, Opera Software is limiting testing releases to generic development snapshots, roughly equivalent to Beta releases. It will be only after v10.52 hits the Release Candidate stage that the final phase of development will begin. Still, the availability of the fully fledged Opera 10.52 is not that far off, but, until that point, users should be well aware that running this particular release comes with inherent risks. According to Opera Software, testing the pre-release variants of Opera 10.52 could crash the PC or even lead to data loss.
At the same time, the browser comes with reliability and stability problems, despite the fixes introduced in the latest release: “sending HEAD requests for non-resolvable domain name forever; network problem when using proxy; Opera crashes on page unloading; console.info is missing so pages using it don't load,” Ødegaard stated.
The latest release of Opera 10.52 is available for download here.