14 DAY TRIAL // The first update to Opera 11 is now closer than ever, with Opera Software having already released a Release Candidate Build two Release Candidate Builds to testers.
UPDATE: Since the time when this article was published, Opera 11.01 RC2 also became available for download.
"There are further crash fixes and we fixed some issues with installer errors on Windows Vista and Windows 7," the browser vendor said.
Early adopters can now download Opera 11.01 RC1 and get an idea of what the finalized version of the first evolutionary step for Opera 11 will look like.
Still, Opera 11.01 RC1 continues to be pre-release software and should be treated as such. This means that the development milestone is intended for testing purposes, and that end users are better off running Opera 11 until the update is wrapped up and delivered to them.
Opera Software has yet to announce a general availability deadline for Opera 11.01, but as testers are undoubtedly accustomed to, it won’t take the browser vendor very long to wrap up the refresh and serve it.
Ruarí Ødegaard, from the Opera Desktop team made it clear that testers should focus their efforts on Opera 11 and report any bugs introduced with the advent of v.11.01 Build 1189.
“As we are very close to release now we are only interested in regressions from the 11.00 final, so please do not post messages about other bugs here. If you want to discuss other bugs please do so in our forums. All further work will be going into a future version of Opera,” Ødegaard stated.
According to Ødegaard, the focus with the Release Candidate development milestone was to resolve some common crashes identified in the last Beta Builds.
And it appears that although Opera Software is already looking ahead to the next major iteration of Opera, the company is not yet ready to start talking about the release.
Of course, first thing’s first, and the next item on Opera Software’s to-do list is ship the first update to Opera 11.
Opera 11.01 RC 2 for Windows is available for download here.