14 DAY TRIAL // Multiple Alpha releases at the end of the past week are followed by the first Beta development snapshot for the next major version of Opera, launched today.
Codenamed Swordfish, Opera 11.50 is the successor of Opera 11.10, which also featured a special code name, Barracuda.
With the launch of the Beta for codenamed Swordfish, Opera Software is signaling the fact that the next iteration of its browser is closer to being wrapped up and served to the public.
For the time being however, the Beta label indicates that the current Build is still pre-release software designed for testing environments and early adopters and not for end users.
A member of the Opera Desktop Team revealed that a range of enhancements were introduced in Opera 11.50 Beta, allowing testers to get a taste of what the fully fledged Opera 11.50 release will bring to the table.
“First of all, we have new features like Speed Dial extensions, password synchronization through Opera Link, and the Opera Next development channel which allows you to keep your main Opera installation and your test installation separate.
“We have of course continued to polish Speed Dial. [There’s] a new "Add Speed Dial" dialog which lets you choose between sites and extensions using thumbnails in the dialog itself.
“There are also numerous other smaller and bigger fixes and enhancements, such as holding down Ctrl when clicking a link to open it in the background, tab handling improvements (that among other things allow you to stack tabs in the Windows panel), and so on,” the Opera Desktop Team representative added.
At the same time, the Norway-based browser vendor tinkered with Operas 11.50 under the hood, introducing an upgrade to the Presto engine.
“Not only are there numerous bug fixes, but our Core team has implemented a number of new HTML5 features, improved SVG performance, tweaked the memory usage of the EcmaScript cache, and more,” the Opera Desktop team member said.
Opera 11.50 Beta Codenamed Swordfish is available for download here.