Opera 10.60 Alpha 1: Speed, eye-candy, and bug fixing
By Haavard. Monday, 31. May 2010, 11:00:00
We are now preparing for a 10.60 release, which we aim to synchronize across all desktop platforms. This alpha will give you noticeable gains in performance, an improved user interface (UI), and lots of bug fixes.
Performance!
Our Core team never rests, and we have noticeably increased Opera's performance once again. You should see performance improvements for both JavaScript, DOM and CSS.
UI improvements
In addition to the visual tweaks you have seen already, such as the Speed Dial facelift, we have also been making further UI enhancements. You will notice that the O menu button now says "Menu" for easy discovery, and instead of hard to read thumbnails for internal tabs, we have replaced them with icons. The tab hover previews have also received a facelift.
On Windows, we have disabled the Windows 7 taskbar previews by default, as they were causing frustration for people with a lot of open tabs. You can enable them from the Tabs sections of the Preferences dialog.
Carbon-neutral?
Following the major rewrite of the Opera Framework for 10.50, which replaced Carbon with Cocoa, we have gone back and removed as much Carbon code as possible. The few things that are left are loaded dynamically, which should improve performance.
Also for our Mac users, please note that Java only works if you have installed the very latest Java update on Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. There is no Java support on Mac OS 10.4.
Unix
For Unix users, this obviously means that there will be no 10.5x version. However, we are aiming for synchronizing the 10.60 release across all platforms, and Unix will benefit from all the improvements since 10.5x.
Known issues
WARNING: This is an alpha build of Opera. It is released for testing purposes, and there may be serious bugs and unfinished features.
Download
Performance!
Our Core team never rests, and we have noticeably increased Opera's performance once again. You should see performance improvements for both JavaScript, DOM and CSS.
UI improvements
In addition to the visual tweaks you have seen already, such as the Speed Dial facelift, we have also been making further UI enhancements. You will notice that the O menu button now says "Menu" for easy discovery, and instead of hard to read thumbnails for internal tabs, we have replaced them with icons. The tab hover previews have also received a facelift.
On Windows, we have disabled the Windows 7 taskbar previews by default, as they were causing frustration for people with a lot of open tabs. You can enable them from the Tabs sections of the Preferences dialog.
Carbon-neutral?
Following the major rewrite of the Opera Framework for 10.50, which replaced Carbon with Cocoa, we have gone back and removed as much Carbon code as possible. The few things that are left are loaded dynamically, which should improve performance.
Also for our Mac users, please note that Java only works if you have installed the very latest Java update on Mac OS 10.5 and 10.6. There is no Java support on Mac OS 10.4.
Unix
For Unix users, this obviously means that there will be no 10.5x version. However, we are aiming for synchronizing the 10.60 release across all platforms, and Unix will benefit from all the improvements since 10.5x.
Known issues
- Icon replacements for internal pages are stretched in the tab hover previews
- Webfonts are broken on Mac and Unix
- CORE-30259 (Text selection lost (breaks Quick Quote on My Opera))
WARNING: This is an alpha build of Opera. It is released for testing purposes, and there may be serious bugs and unfinished features.
Download
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