14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta development snapshot of Opera 11.10 codenamed Barracuda will be made available for download tomorrow, March 17th, 2011. Opera Software confirmed the milestone officially, and users need to keep their eyes on Softpedia, as I’ll make sure to provide an update the minute that Opera 11.10 Barracuda Beta downloads go live.
Having reached Beta, Opera 11.10 will be one step closer to finalization, but still just pre-release software designed for early adopters to test and not for end users to deploy into production environments.
While testers are waiting for the Beta Build to be launched, they can go ahead and take the latest Alpha release out for a spin.
On March 15th, 2011, Opera Software provided users with no less than two Alpha Builds of Opera 11.10, delivering such enhancements as CSS gradients, WebP, Declarative UI and synchronized Speed Dial 2.0.
“We decided to throw you a "fastball" and give you another snapshot with some really cool new Core features, including native WebP support and linear CSS gradients support,” revealed Ruarí Ødegaard, from the Opera Desktop team.
“Declarative UI represents the future of dialogs and other native UI in Opera. Those of you who regularly sniff around in the contents of the Opera packages might know that our dialogs have been generated via a file called dialog.ini, which contains positions, sizes and other properties for many of the UI controls appearing in Opera.
“This is part of Opera's UI toolkit, Quick, and allows us to make dialogs appear similar across different platforms,” Ødegaard added.
The Norway-based browser vendor plans to make additional changes to this format in the future, transitioning to YAML, as a way to compensate for the limitations they currently face.
The latest Alpha development milestone, Build 2045, offers Opera 11.10 testers the possibility to synchronize Speed Dial through Opera Link. This option had been disabled temporarily, but with the introduction of a number of bug fixes it has been re-enabled.
Opera 11.10 codenamed Barracuda Alpha for Windows is available for download here.