It is too early to tell if Opera's move to the Blink engine away from Presto is going to pay off in terms of overall users who use the web browser as their primary, or if the company has shot itself in the foot with it.

The company has received a lot of comments on the desktop team blog when the first Opera 15 Next version was released, with the majority of them critical of the move.

That's somewhat understandable, considering that Opera made a full U-Turn here and published a browser that is almost the complete opposite of the original Opera browser.

Consider this: A part of Firefox's user base is criticizing Mozilla for implementing the Australis design soon in the browser. Imagine this, but only ten times worse.

It needs to be noted that we are talking about test releases here, not final versions, and that Opera is working on improving the browser.

Yesterday's update brought a couple of additions to Opera Next, like proxy aware auto-updating, faster loading of Speed Dials and better sensitivity for mouse gestures.

The build has been made available for Windows and Mac only, and it appears that this is not going to change anytime soon.

Daniel Aleksandersen, the Opera employee who published news of the update on the Opera Desktop Team blog mentioned that there won't be a Linux version for the first release.

There will not be one for the first release. Our efforts are focused on the majority platforms for the time being. We want to offer really kick-ass quality to as many users as possible. That requires hard decisions and focus.

While not explicitly stated, it is likely that he is referring to the first official release of Opera 15. It is not clear when the first stable build will be released by Opera, but it is likely that it is going to take some time before this is going to happen.

If you are running Opera Next right now, you should receive the update automatically soon if you have not already. Note that Opera decided to not implement a "check for update" option in the browser to avoid users hammering the servers. The only way to install the update immediately is to download it and run it manually.

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