Start of the Opera Developer Stream

As announced on the Desktop Team Blog a while back, we’ve now switched to a fast release cycle with three different streams: Stable, Next and Developer.

Opera Developer logo

Today marks the release of our first Opera Developer build (Mac, Windows). If you’re a web or extension developer, we recommend you to install this build, which will be auto-updated frequently from now on, and gives a peek at what we have in the pipeline, including but not limited to fresh web standards support.

What is the difference between Next and Developer? Opera Next is a preview of what will be in the next stable version of Opera, which at present is v16. Opera Developer on the other hand is more experimental: this build includes stuff that you may see in v17 or later, but possibly also features that never make it to stable.

To give a better feeling of this, here are some of the differences between the current Opera Next and this first Opera Developer build:

  • the current Opera Next version number is 16.0.1196.29, and it runs on Chrome 29; Opera Developer has 17.0.1224.1 as version number, and runs on Chrome 30.
  • in this first Opera Developer build, we’ve brought back Opera 12’s tab pinning functionality, as well as rocker gestures (just enable mouse gestures if you haven’t done so already)
  • more extension API support: bookmarks, commands, omnibox, webNavigation — we’re still working on documentation for those
  • if you go to opera:settings in this build, you’ll see 3 “On startup” options, giving you the choice between continuing from where you left off, opening a start page or opening a set of pages.
  • another opera:settings option allows you to set custom search engines and trigger them with a keyword
  • in opera:flags, you’ll find a whole bunch of extra, more experimental settings. Some of this is Chromium stuff that you’ll also find in Chrome Canary, while other bits are Opera-only flags. A selection:

      * **Media capture** gives you microphone and camera support, which you can try out with [Web Audio Playground](http://webaudioplayground.appspot.com) and [Webcam Toy](http://webcamtoy.com).
      * **Extension action context menu** adds a right-click menu to extension buttons, allowing for easy uninstalling of extensions and hiding of buttons.
      * **Enable lazy session loading** allows you to start the browser quickly with multiple tabs, but it will only load those tabs when they are activated.
      * **Theme installation** allows you to install themes from our [addons catalog](https://addons.opera.com/themes/). In a first phase, we’re supporting a subset of the old theme format; we’re working on an updated theme format where you can use a different background image for Speed Dial, Downloads, Settings, etc.
    

Give it a spin, and let us know what you think!