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.
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Even If It's Not Ready...
I don't think people are clamoring as much to have Opera 9 officially released as to just get to be able to play with ANOTHER PREVIEW. I would love to see some of the SVG bugs in Opera 9 TP1 fixed in Opera 9 TP2 (because I know they have already been fixed in discussions with developers). However, I would never expect Opera to officially release until it is truly ready for prime time. Just give us a taste! ;)
I'm not talking about 9.0
I'm not talking about 9.0 final. I'm talking about 9.0P2. It has not been ready for use and will be released when it is.
Hm, I guess WIR = Tuesday
Link
No problem...
I'am using the 9.0 Preview 1 since it is available as one and only primary browser (serveral hours a day), as one should NOT do ;)
There are some little problems, right. But none is that bad, that i would even think of downgrading. So thanks for this awesome preview and take ya time for the next one :)
Why some beta testers don't wont to downgrade
> And what is it with the reluctance to downgrade?
Those beta testers who, despite the warnings, did upgrade to 9.0TP1 and use it as their primary browser AND mail client, are unable to downgrade because the format of message base has changed.
And the inability to
And the inability to downgrade the mail client is probably the number one reason they shouldn't have upgraded in the first place.
Which was exactly the main
Which was exactly the main reason why I didn't even really try 9TP1. However, "don't kid yourself", be sure that a lot of Opera fans did upgrade, even M2, even with the warning.
Anyway, what I don't quite understand: couldn't you form two teams? Like in Formula 1, where one teams develops and works ond the car of the current season, and the other develops that of the following season?
Opera said repeatedly in the past that they have added a lot of new developers, so I kind of expected that a small group of developers would be maintaining the O8 branch, while the vast majority could hack away at the trunk for O9. Perhaps even merging some stuff from the trunk to the O8 branch would be possible, more independent sub-modules like IMAP or Bittorrent.
I'm not sure if your allowed to talk about your internal developement structure, but (being a developer myself) I sure would be interested in it. :-)
We are maintaining 8.x,
We are maintaining 8.x, which is why you say 8.01, 8.02, 8.5, and 8.51. Maintaining a branch is not the same as adding new features to it. We typically don't add new features to old branches, as backporting takes time away from development on the feature branch.
depends on how you define "maintain"
Well, it all depends on how you define "maintain", I think. :)
Sure, backporting takes time, it is something we don't do lightly either. However, for the customer it often means getting a new feature sooner, so for him it pays off.
I'm very much for the "small is beautiful" approach, and personally, I like getting four smaller updates a year much more than one huge update that intimidates me. :)
Plus, Opera would be in the headlines more often. The last headline I've seen had to do with the torrent client, and the widgets; both stuff that's not final, but seems to be newsworthy. Even the news editors seem to long for a new Opera release! ;)
Opera developers could write
Opera developers could write a protection code that prevents from TP-over-Final installations and allows only clean istallation of TPs in a new, empty folder. Sure, a warning should be enough for people who can read, but some people can't think logically and will blame you anyway. Besides TPs are spreaded in some other services and often there is no warning only "New Opera!". The protection would solve the problem and protect Opera from bad publicity at least.
That's a whole lot of extra
That's a whole lot of extra code to protect people from making bad decisions. Of course, we do need to test upgrade installs internally, to check if there are problems.
Very good point
Hello!
You've made a very good point about people who use Opera 9 technical preview 1 as their primary browser. That's not just wrong, it's silly, even stupid.
On the irc.opera.com/opera you'll see many asking why pages break in Opera 9tp1 or why something breaks. They get "fond" of the emails they received, of the bookmarks, of the contacts, feeds, etc. So ... when the preview breaks badly they come asking how to recover lost data :).
I always advise people to simply stay away from previews and betas.
Taking the decision of primarly using previews and betas... should be a high-risk and hard decision, knowing what might come.
I download previews and betas only for testing my sites, to see if they break, to see speed improvements, and to take on similar endeavors.
Yet, this shouldn't make Opera Software release previews less often. Previews would be cool to be released on a monthly basis, in an automated way, similar to the Firefox nightly builds.
Previews and betas could be made to simply remove all emails, all bookmarks, all settings, everything - like after a clean install. This should be done each 2 days. This would really enforce all n00bs to just experiment with the browser. Extreme method, that should work :).
Opera Preview
I would agree with you; frankly I am not aware of the developmental processes which make the "beta" software bug ridden. I did install Opera 9 Preview 1 only to have the "latest". Though it had memory problems.
I did downgrade to Opera 8.51 and had no qualms about it. Though I am hoping that final 9 is out soon! It should be fun.