Hi everyone!

While you may have seen me around in the blogs and forums, this is my first blog post on the desktop team blog. My former team mates and I have in fact been working on the desktop product all along as a separate team, but now we have merged with the rest of the desktop developers and QA to form a new and even stronger (and bigger!) desktop team.

We know that you have been waiting to get your hands on Opera 10 (Peregrine), and I am happy to announce that we are planning to release the first alpha of Opera 10 in the near future. The new version is the result of hard work that has been going on since even before 9.5 was released, and we are finally ready to let it spread its wings and fly out into the real world.

I'm not going to reveal too many details today, but I do want to talk a bit about what you can expect.

Opera 10 will feature the new Presto 2.2 engine (Opera 9.x runs on Presto 2.1.x), and one of the main purposes of the first alpha is to get some real-world testing, so that even more bugs can be fixed. A huge number of bugs have been fixed already since Presto 2.1, and there are a lot of new things in here, including improved performance and standards compliance. We hope, no, we know that you will help us find even more bugs and areas of improvement.

In addition to an updated engine with new features of its own, we have worked hard on adding a few user-related features that we have noticed are frequently requested by the community. I think a lot of people will be pleased with these additions.

Opera 10 is finally coming, and you can expect improved performance as well as features that we know that a lot of people in the community have requested.

Tune in next week for more details.