Howdy! This is my first post here, so let me introduce myself: my name is Tim Altman and I work for Opera Software in the Desktop QA department. My main focus is Opera Mail, though I also help out the Mac and Core teams as needed. I'm the only member of the Desktop Team living in the United States, where I work from my home.

Now, let's get down to business. We wanted to give y'all an update about Kestrel. Back in June, we announced that the first weekly would be "within a few weeks". It's become painfully obvious that we underestimated the amount of time it would take for us to deliver a preview of Kestrel to the public. When we release a build with as many changes as Kestrel, we want to make sure that our users are able to use the build as much as possible, so we can get the best feedback possible. We have strict quality standards that have not yet been met. Back in June, we thought it would only take us a few weeks to reach the required quality. However, as we developed and tested more, we continued to find serious issues that we could not in good conscience inflict upon our users.

When can you expect to see the preview of Kestrel? It's hard to tell. It depends on whether we find new problems, and if we do, how serious they are. I know a lot of you are anxious to test out the things we've been developing for the past year and we're anxious to hear your feedback. All of us will have to be patient to ensure that y'all get a reasonably solid build to make this whole process worthwhile.

We have a long road ahead of us. Initial builds of Kestrel will not be able to replace 9.23. There are still many, many problems that need to be fixed. For instance, Kestrel is nowhere near as stable as 9.23 and Opera Mail is not ready for production use. After the first build, releases should come often, though not necessarily every week nor always on Fridays. We will try to resolve as many problems as we can with each release, but all bugs reported one week will not be fixed by the following week.

What's a Kestrel post without information about new features? Since I work mostly with Opera Mail, I'll give a couple hints about what we've been up to. Many users have requested the ability to manually update newsfeeds even if they aren't due for an update. OK, done! If you are in the main newsfeeds access point, pressing F5 will update all newsfeeds. We've also resolved the issue where the View > Encoding menu didn't do anything for messages. That's all that I'll reveal this time around....

Thank you for your interest in the future of Opera! Stay tuned for more news.