9.27 vs. 9.50 Beta Security Question

Hello all,

I am wondering, since I use 9.50 Beta during the course of my normal day
in order to find bugs and the like to report, hopefully to improve
Opera, am I also presenting myself as a target, however small, to
security threats not present in the stable versions of Opera?

That is, I notice the updates to the stable branch through 9.26, 27,
&c., and I don't see updates to the betas. Does that mean that the
no updates to the Betas are required, or that the Betas are not updated
to handle security options?

Thanks!
-- 
Aaron Hsu <arcfide@sacrideo.us> | Jabber: arcfide@jabber.org
``Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to

Op Fri, 04 Apr 2008 08:33:08 +0200 schreef Aaron Hsu
<arcfide@sacrideo.us>:

> Hello all,
>
> I am wondering, since I use 9.50 Beta during the course of my normal day
> in order to find bugs and the like to report, hopefully to improve
> Opera, am I also presenting myself as a target, however small, to
> security threats not present in the stable versions of Opera?
>
> That is, I notice the updates to the stable branch through 9.26, 27,
> &c., and I don't see updates to the betas. Does that mean that the
> no updates to the Betas are required, or that the Betas are not updated
> to handle security options?

In general, if you use recent test versions (that means, from the  
Desktopteam blog), you are at least as secure w.r.t. known security issues  
as using the official release version. Security fixes usually go into both  
the maintenance branch of the code (from which the 9.2x releases are  
build) and the active development branch. There might be rare cases where  
this doesn't apply, for example when there are multiple weeks between test  
releases and the security issue is really new, or when a test version is  
in early development and the developers have not synched the security  
fixes to the development branch because it is unstable etc. But this is  
not one of those cases.

-- 
                                                      Rijk van Geijtenbeek
                                    Opera Software ASA, Documentation & QA
                                     Tweak: http://my.opera.com/Rijk/blog/

"The most common way to get usability wrong is to listen to what users