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The code chimps at Norway’s Opera Software aren’t about to give the competition any room to breath and have created a pair of new releases — a bug fix and an alpha that brings new features, as well as contest that ordinary people can enter and win.

Opera 11.11 (2109) (change log) is being proffered as a needed upgrade, offering security and stability enhancements. Specifically, here’s a selection of the top issues addressed:

• Crash when opening a folder selector in a widget
• Opera installer crashing as soon as the installation wizard starts
• Crash when opening www.falk.de
• Crash when reloading page after opening a sticky-note extension popup
• Marking a mail message in Trash as unread causes it to disappear
• Plus additional bug and security fixes

That said, Opera 11.11 hasn’t boosted this browser’s HTML5 benchmark score of 260.

A penny for your extensions

Opera 11.5 alpha (blog), which is also known as Swordfish, comes to market with three important new features: Opera Next ( a dev channel for snapshots), password synchronization and Speed Dial extensions.

Regarding the latter, Opera blogger André Øverhahl has announced the Team Up Speed Dial extensions contest:

The first 10 Speed Dial extensions that get submitted and approved into Opera Add-ons catalog will get an Opera laptop sleeve and stickers – each for the developer and non-developer.

I’m guessing the real attraction here is the cachet of being among the first to get approved as the prizes are, well, rather thin. Then again, as a former marketing person, I know you should never underestimate the power of swag — stickers rule…

What’s your take?

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