If you’re an early adopter type, you want to get things first. You don’t want to wait for the first “unboxing” of a gadget on the Web, you want to be the unboxer, right? You don’t want to wait for all the kinks to be ironed out, you want to see them in their first, raw nature. Reading reviews? Who does that anyway?
Opera announced today its own version for the early adopters, Opera Next, the potentially unstable and bug-ridden version of Opera for you early adopter types out there who want to know what’s next.
Opera Next provides a separate installation that previews what’s coming up without affecting the main installation of the browser. It also provides an automatic update as new versions become available.
If you’re also a Chrome user, then this is like jumping onto the Dev Channel, which gives you a sneak peek of the next somewhat stable and tested version of Chrome. Unlike the Chrome Dev Channel, however, Opera Next provides the experience in a separate browser installation entirely, so you don’t have to choose between a stable browsing experience and seeing what’s next.
By downloading Opera Next right now, you can see (appropriately) what’s coming next with our favorite data-crunching, speed-centric browser – live, interactive speed dials. Speed dials are the buttons that appear when you open a new browser tab in Opera and let you quickly choose among a number of common pages. Now, they have gone interactive:
Interactive speed dials bring in a number of features. For example, the “dial” itself can be automatically updated and live, such as a weather dial that shows up-to-date weather information. Or it can pull in an RSS feed preview, as shown above. It can even collect user specified content, such as images collected and tagged from around the Web within Opera.
Opera Next is available for download today.
