Opera 9.23 has been released and is ready for consumption by the general public. A majority of the things fixed in this release are credited to Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool that was released at Black Hat about two-weeks ago. The tool found four bugs in Opera that caused crashes, and one "highly severe" security vulnerability:
- Fixed four crash bugs found using Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool.
- Fixed a stability issue with Speed Dial.
- Fixed a critical JavaScript security issue discovered with Mozilla’s jsfunfuzz tool: "A virtual function call on an invalid pointer that may reference data crafted by the attacker can be used to execute arbitrary code."
- Windows Vista Only: Scrolling problem with some Microsoft mice fixed.
I’m happy that Mozilla was kind enough to release the tool for everyone to use, and I’m extremely happy that people are actually using it! As I stated last time, jsfunfuzz has caught an astonishing 280 bugs in Firefox’s JavaScript engine, and more than two-thirds of those have already been fixed. Thanks to jsfunfuzz, and the creator Jesse Ruderman, the Web has just gotten a little safer.
Now I’m hoping to see test builds of Opera 9.5 soon, and from the looks of it the Opera Desktop Team isn’t taking kindly to comments regarding future versions of the browser. Almost all comments that mention Opera 9.5 are said to be off-topic, and are consequently being removed. I’m sure it is getting annoying for them when every other comment is along the lines of "can’t wait for 9.5," but that is just their community getting excited for the release. Now commenters are referring to it as "The-Build-Which-Should-Not-Be-Named," or TBWSNBN for short. 
I understand why it is being done, but I was pretty disappointed when I saw my comment get removed as well.
So now I can’t wait to get my hands on TBWSNBN!
Download Opera 9.23
Download Opera 9.23 using BitTorrent
Source: Opera Watch & Opera Desktop Team
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Tags: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Browser, Mozilla, Opera
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Ryan: I work for Opera Software in the Desktop QA dept. and I’m most likely the one that deleted your comment. Feedback from our users is very important to us. Recently, we’ve released several 9.2x preview releases via the Desktop Team blog to help improve the final releases. The blog posts about those weeklies were inundated with off-topic comments, making it more difficult for us to locate and respond to those that are providing us with feedback about the weekly releases. That’s why many off-topic comments have been deleted.
If you follow the Desktop Team blog, you may remember when it was similarly inundated with comments saying, “First!”, “Tenth!”, etc. These comments were also deleted and that issue has largely gone away.
We’re not trying to censor posts about Kestrel, but rather to have feedback in the appropriate place. There have been several recent blog posts on the Desktop Team blog about 9.5 (code-named Kestrel) and discussion of Kestrel in those posts is exactly what we’re looking for. We also have very active forums and newsgroups, which are a great place for discussions about future releases, such as Kestrel.
Thank you for your enthusiasm and patience.
Sadly, if you do go back to older posts that concerned kestrel and post inquiries or other thoughts about kestrel, they will probably be not seen or ignored. I speak from experience. I tried doing things the right way and still I get no response. It seems to be a lose-lose situation. I have to wait until the dev team says I can talk about kestrel.
Thanks for the repsonse Tim! I agree with the deleting those comments from people who were always saying things like “First!” because they added no value to the post. I still believe that any discussions regarding Opera 9.5 should remain untouched though, because it just builds excitement about your own product.
It’s understandable that you want to use the comments area as a location for people to give feedback on the weekly releases, but as fearphage said there really aren’t that many places for people to just express their excitement for Kestrel. Sure there are the forums and stuff, but sometimes it’s just nice to jump in and say “I’m still on the edge of my seat waiting for 9.5!”
Maybe there should be a big banner on the homepage of the Desktop Team blog pointing to a location where we can leave comments regarding Opera 9.5, and a good spot for that would probably be on the primary Kestrel post that you had done.
Ryan: We’re working on a FAQ for the Desktop Team blog that should help users decide where to post. Unfortunately, I don’t think it’ll be available before the first weekly of Kestrel.
There were lots of complaints about off-topic comments destroying the on-topic discussion. Now the off-topic posters are complaining because the rules are being enforced. Can’t please everyone…
fearphage, if you aren’t getting a response just accept it and move on. You can’t possibly expect Opera to respond to every single comment, especially with all the off-topic trash talk going on.
In fact, you are probably far less likely to get a response with all the off-topic comments. Poor signal to noise ratio and all that. When the rules are enforced there are fewer (nonsensical) comments, which increases your chances of getting a useful response.
So don’t complain before you realize that your posting off-topic comments is contributing to people ignoring you.
Has Opera gotten any better with remembering & instituting passwords?
The last time I tried it, it was quite poor & of course, RoboForm won’t work in Opera.
It works with almost all the sites I use, but they could still make it a little more full featured.
Opera remembers passwords for every single site I’m using.