10.5 Christmas (pre-)alpha
Tuesday, December 22, 2009 8:55:09 AM
Huib today writes “As a Christmas present, we’re happy to share all the goodies of Opera 10.5 with Presto 2.5 with you in an early pre-alpha release” in the desktop team’s blog. The build is available in Windows and Mac OS flavours from labs.opera.com. Unfortunately no Linux or Unix version this time.The new JavaScript engine is blazingly fast. I normally don’t surf very JavaScript-heavy pages, but even on “normal” pages, the increase in speed is noticable.
The screenshot on the right shows it running under Wine, under real Windows it runs without even a title bar. I do not particularly care for the “minimalistic” user interface, but removing everything seems to be the current hype, and we just have to live with until sanity again prevails.
Fortunately, re-enabling the menu bar is simple (click the red “O” button and select “Show Menu Bar”), although doing that did crash the build while running under Wine.
As usual with (pre-)alpha releases, be aware of bugs and have backups handy.


