Opera variant Otter comes with first public beta version

Otter, a browser released with Opera 12’s interface, has released a first beta version to the general public. The makers have set themselves the goal of restoring Opera’s classic interface, which was then based on the Presto engine.

The first beta of Otter carries version number 0.9.01 and can be downloaded from SourceForge for both Windows and Linux. By the way, the source code is also available; the creators posted it on Github. According to the developers behind Otter, a lot of work still needs to be done before the browser can be released as a final.

With Otter, the initiators want to bring the classic interface of the Opera 12 browser back to life. Version 12.x was the last release of Opera to still use the Presto render engine. The Norwegian browser builder, like Google, has switched to the WebKit fork Blink. To replicate the interface of Opera’s Presto generation, the Qt5 application framework is used on top of a port of the WebKit rendering engine: QtWebKit.

Opera itself released the first version of the browser with the Blink engine a year ago, which is part of Google’s Chromium project. It was Opera with version number 15, but the browser has already reached version 22. The Norwegian browser builder stopped using Presto because developing its own render engine would take too much time.