Opera released Happy new year build of Opera 10.5 Pre-alpha

On a new start of new year, what would people do, party or celebrate the new year with friends or parents, even i partied with my friends.But Opera desktop team devs released the new version of Opera i.e Opera 10.5 Pre-alpha build.What was added to this was HTML 5 video element and some stability fixes.

Opera would be supporting the open source Ogg Vorbis audio codec and the Theora video codec. Additionally, Opera will be utilising the GStreamer media framework to ensure smooth playback. Opera will use its own implementation of GStreamer on Windows and Mac. However, it will be using the system-installed version on platforms where GStreamer is natively available. In other words, Opera will be able to playback videos out of the box on Windows and Mac. However on Linux and BSD, you would need to install at least the GStreamer "base" and "good" plugins for the video element to work. The GStreamer plugin for Mac isn't yet ready; hence support for video element is missing in this Mac build.Only Safari remains the only browser which makes use of H.264 codec.

The unix version has been changed most notable being the removed dependency on the QT libraries which caused a problem for users who wanted to install the browser but did not have the libraries installed.This and upcoming versions of Opera do not require the libraries but would make use of them if they are installed on the pc.This means to say that you can run Opera without any graphical toolkit installed if you want to (plain X11), but if you do have toolkits installed, Opera will try to load and use them to integrate into the environment. Currently focus is on getting support for Gnome/GTK+ and KDE4/Qt4 into 10.5. The work on KDE4 integration is not at a stage yet where we think it can be used, so this pre-alpha release only has support for GTK.

Opera’s 10.5 build seems to be fastest among the browsers and almost beats chrome too.Techie-Buzz and Lifehacker did a benchmark on javascript page rendering and Opera emerged being the fastest there.So if you want to try out the Opera pre alpha 10.5 build, install it on a seperate folder so that it doesn’t create a conflict with the Opera version installed.It’s other features include the new Private Browsing tabs and windows that don’t track any history, and some interface and visual design tweaks. The big JavaScript improvements aren’t as pronounced on the Mac build though as on Windows.So do give it a try and let me know how fast was it for you.

Download Opera 10.5 Pre-alpha build for Windows Mac and Unix

This posting includes an audio/video/photo media file: Download Now