Today the first alpha version of Opera 9.50, code name Kestrel, was released for Unix, Mac and Windows.

Among the news in 9.50 is a synchronisation feature that allows you to save your bookmarks and speed dial on your My Opera account, and fetch it to other machines where you also have Opera installed, or retrieve them after a machine crash, and a full text search of all visited pages. Among the functions I have worked on is an updated info panel (you can show the info panel by enabling it in Tools → Appearance → Panels → Info), that the support for international domain names now correctly can handle names with characters outside the BMP, a new implementation of Unicode line breaking, and of course a lot of other things “behind the scenes”. In addition, there is now a 64-bit version for Linux, which is nice since my new computer is 64-bit. I have been running the 64-bit version exclusively on the computer, and it has worked, most of the time.

The team behind the 9.50 release recently wrote about what they have focused on for 9.50, compared to the 9.00 series, code name Merlin. Since Merlin there have been done several man-years of work, which hopefully shows in this version, even if it is an alpha version (unfinished test version).

This is probably the last product release I participate in as an Opera employee. More on that later.