RutSum

Opera Kestrel 9.5 Beta 2

It has been a long wait, since the first beta was released way back in October 2007. Kestrel Beta 1 for Linux is quite buggy, and is almost unusable currently. It crashes continuously, gets stuck, is very bad with flash, and has quite a few glitches which required immediate attention. I had to pay very dearly for upgrading to 9.5 Beta 1 on my PCLinuxOS system, because the the mail and wand settings files are incompatible with the ones from the 9.2 version. Because of this I lost most of my settings when I wanted to downgrade back to the stable version. And now Flash doesn’t work on the older version. Instead of the swf, just a gray box is displayed.

Well not losing hope, the Opera devs recently gave me a reason to rejoice, they became the first to pass all the 100 tests on the Acid3.

And now, after a long wait, the latest post on the Opera Desktop Team blog says that the beta 2 will be out soon, and will include a lot of fixes, updates and new features. But they still insist that kestrel is nowhere near to stable, and has a long list of bugs to be fixed. Why I am waiting for this release so eagerly is that I really want to get flash to work with Opera, along with having a browser that does not crash randomly. I do expect this one to be more stable than the first beta, and I think they have taken enough time already. Canonical releases a whole new distro in the time they have taken to release a new beta.

UPDATE : Opera Kestrel 9.5 Beta 2 has been released. You can download it from here. I’ll be posting my experience with it soon.

UPDATE : Kestrel Beta 2 review here.

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