It's been a long time since Opera 9.0 Preview 1 was released. It's not surprising that there's quite a lot of speculation as to why that is. I hope to shed some light on the subject.
According to our Beta Testing site, previews "should never be installed over a final release" and are "not to be used as a substitute for a final release." They generally have many, many known bugs. Our main goal is getting feedback on new features, as well as finding severe problems we had not found in our internal testing. We don't kid ourselves; we know users will use previews as their primary browser, despite our warnings. But I really don't understand why users are surprised when they have to downgrade to the previous public release due to bugs, especially when they shouldn't do upgrade installs in the first place.
And what is it with the reluctance to downgrade? I saw a comment in the my.opera.com Beta Testing forum today from some guy that said Opera 9.0 Preview 1 was too buggy, so he's been using another browser. If you used a non-alpha/beta release before, why can't you use it again? There is no shame in downgrading. But I digress.
In Merlin, we've worked on cleaning up a lot of long-standing issues early on. Many of these changes were very high risk and broke lots of other stuff. That's expected with this type of development and part of the reason it's done early in the development cycle. So, we hunker down and fix, fix, fix. All this is happening while end-users are using existing preview, beta, or final releases and finding problems. Not to mention web sites being upgraded, specifications changing, etc. All of which can lead to new bug reports that should be prioritized. After all, we want our products to improve from release to release.
Add all this up, and we take a lot of time improving our product between releases. High risk fixes destabilize things for a while. Changes are interdependent. Things take time. If a preview has lots of problems, we have lots to fix before the next one, so there's lots of time between releases. Remember: we use our products, too. We feel the same pain.
All I'm asking for is a little trust and patience. If there isn't a new release for a while, it's because we're trying to make the next release as usable and testable as possible. If we don't say when the next release will be out, it's because we want to focus on fixing bugs, not looking at our calendars: it'll be out when it's more usable and testable than the previous release.
