Today, we start a pilot program of semi-weekly releases. While preview and beta releases provide extremely valuable feedback and bug reports, weeklies will further improve our ability to fix the issues most important to our users and receive feedback about new features while the changes are still fresh in our developers' minds. Users will also get a closer look at our development process and see what life at the Opera HQ is really like.
Weekly snapshots will normally be released on Fridays (despite kicking this off on a Monday), though we will skip weeks when we feel the builds are not good enough for release. Some platforms may be held back while others are released, though UNIX is mostly likely to be affected because of the sheer number of builds that need to be created and tested. Current plans are to continue these weeklies until the release of Merlin final.
We've created a new blog for our Desktop Team to announce and provide you with information about our snapshots. Feedback from these releases should still go in our Beta Testing forum or the opera.beta newsgroup. Weeklies do not replace preview or beta releases. Instead, they are an additional type of release that improves the others.
These weekly releases don't have anywhere near the same quality requirement as our preview, beta, or final releases, so users should expect to experience problems. Normally, we perform security and regression testing prior to every release, fixing most problems before users ever know about them. Now, these types of problems will be much more visible, though they will still be taken care of as soon as possible. Due to these lowered quality requirements, it's imperative that users back up their files before installing these weekly snapshots: data loss or corruption is even more likely than with preview releases.
Without further ado, get our first weekly while it's hot! We're interested in your feedback about the weekly release program, as well as the builds themselves, so please let us know what you think.
