Yesterday, Opera 10.5 pre-alpha (codenamed Evenes) was released as a special gift to the small but dedicated fan base. It definitely had everyone talking. You can find our review of Opera 10.5 here. In short, Evenes is fast – really fast. It not only came close to Safari and Chrome’s JavaScript rendering speed but also defeated them in most of the benchmarks. Unfortunately the pre-alpha build was released only for Windows and Mac, leaving Linux users high and dry. But, this doesn’t mean that Opera Software has forgotten about UNIX users.
Yesterday, Opera software didn’t release a UNIX build of Evenes simply because, it wasn’t polished enough to be usable. Opera has long been criticized due to the lack of a native interface for UNIX and Mac. With Opera 10.5 for Mac, the developers have tried to address this issue by switching to the Cocoa framework. Similar treatment is planned for the Linux build too.
With Evenes, Opera Software will be ditching the QT framework. Yes, you would no longer need to have QT libraries installed in order to use Opera. This is expected to make Opera smaller and faster.
Opera 10.5 will be using X Window (X11) drawing primitives. However, it will also support native styling for both Gnome and KDE. The KDE build isn’t yet ready but we do have a few screenshots for GNOME users.
So, when will Opera 10.5 pre-alpha for Linux be released? When it’s ready.