14 DAY TRIAL // Want a taste of what the next version of Opera will introduce? Then by all means, download the first Alpha development snapshot of Opera 11.10 codenamed “Barracuda.” Opera Software recently announced that it was starting to look to the future, which as far as the Opera browser is concerned, involves a species of predatory fish.
With Build 2005, the Norway-based browser vendor is offering early adopters the chance to take the Alpha release of Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” out for a spin.
But end users need to understand that this release is designed for testing environments, and should not be deployed into production, especially since various problems, crashes included, are to be expected.
“In this build, Core has been upgraded from version 2.7.62 to 2.8.99, which is a pretty big step forward. With this Core upgrade comes the implementation of the Web Open Font Format (WOFF),” revealed Manuela Hutter, from the Opera Desktop team.
“In addition, a batch of changes to network compatibility has been implemented. The purpose of these changes is to modify our network behavior so that we are more compatible with other web browsers.”
Mac OS X testers will undoubtedly notice that Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” Alpha Build 2005 is designed to play a tad nicer with Facebook, Live Mail/Hotmail, and Google Docs, with the number of crashes having been reduced.
However, there are still issues that plague the release. But users should not read all that much into this, since Build 2005 is an Alpha snapshot after all.
Opera 11.10 “Barracuda” Alpha Build 2005 will not deliver HTML5 media playback on Mac, and it will not, at least for the time being, ace the Acid3 Test, with mouse panning being broken on Windows.
Changes introduced include: “Disable Cookie2 by default, with an option to enable it again; send more compatible Accept header on second request; disable TLS 1.1 and 1.2 by default; make sure redirects from http to https are labelled secure; remove the use of master password for client certificates; added a preference to disable cross-network protection.”
Again, this is just the first release of Opera 11.10 “Barracuda,” and it will certainly be worth watching where Opera Software takes this version.
Opera 11.10 codenamed Barracuda Alpha for Windows is available for download here.