14 DAY TRIAL // Opera 15, the first Chrome-based Opera has been around for more than a day now and fans and non-fans alike have taken it for a spin. Plenty of people didn't like the changes, but some saw the potential and recognized it as an initial release.
Not only is Opera 15 an initial release, but the company plans to get Opera 16 ready much faster than before. In fact, Opera has announced that it plans to follow a three-channel release system, like Chrome and Firefox already use.
While the company hasn't settled on how fast new releases will come out yet, it has settled on the names of the three channels.
Opera Developer will be the equivalent of the Chrome dev channel, and Firefox Aurora and will be the least stable release.
Opera Next is the equivalent of the Chrome and Firefox beta channels. This is where features are polished and bugs ironed out before graduating to the stable channel.
Finally, the Opera channel will be the stable one, the regular Opera release that most people should be using.
Chrome uses a six-week release schedule, and so does Firefox. Since the new Opera is based on Chrome, six weeks should make sense for Opera as well.
However, that may not happen in the beginning as there's still a lot of work to be done before Opera can pump out new versions at this pace.
The good news is that, if something is missing from the current release, the next is just around the corner. And with so many things missing from Opera 15, that's a good thing.
Opera has already promised to bring back several features from the old and still supported Opera 12.x branch and will probably add a few more features from Chrome as well in time.
The new Opera already has some advantages over the old one. It's snappier and supports more web technologies, so building on that base, the new Opera browser may end up being a better version of Chrome, the most popular browser in the world.