The next iteration of the Opera browser is slowly starting to take shape, even though the Norwegian browser maker is in no way ready to share details with the general public just yet. Approximately two months after it released its latest major version of Opera, Opera Software has officially confirmed that it is starting to focus on the upcoming version of the browser. Of course, information on Opera vNext is almost inexistent at this point in time, as the company hasn’t even made public the major build upgrade it is aiming for. But make no mistake about it, the next iteration of Opera, beyond Opera 10.0, is coming into focus, already grabbing the vast majority of resources available.

On October 29th, 2009, a new Beta development milestone of Opera 10.10 with Unite was made available for download. One member of the Opera Desktop team explained that there were reasons why the changelog was not more consistent, blaming in part the resource shift to the successor of Opera 10.0.

“The changelog [for the latest Build of Opera 10.10] isn't very big this time around. This is partially due to a seminar we attended last week, but a lot of the desktop resources have been moved to the next "major" version of Opera as well. We are not quite ready to share any details about this yet, but stay tuned,” the Opera Desktop team member stated. (emphasis added)

And apparently Opera Software is not only working on the evolution of Opera beyond version 10, but even further. “I won't go into too much detail about the seminar either, but among the subjects that were covered were some plans for the next couple of major versions of the desktop browser, and some pretty awesome news for Opera Mobile and Opera Mini users,” the opera Desktop team representative added. “Work on Unite in 10.10 will continue, so expect more Unite builds in the near future.”

Opera 10.01 is available for download here.
The latest release of Opera 10.10 with Unite is available for download here.