Opera 10.20 Alpha, much like Opera 10.10, is a strange beast. The major new feature of this test release is not necessarily a browser feature, but a web feature.

Previously seen as a build in the Opera Labs, Opera Widget Runtime makes it serious entrance in a real Opera release. In the mean time the developers worked hard to polish the entire release, meaning installing and uninstalling Opera Widgets is painless.

Compared to full web applications, Opera Widget adds several extensions which is proposed as the widget standard to W3C as a Widget API. These extensions focus on File I/O, simple notifications, native borders and more.

If you're afraid that it might harm your browser stability you'll be surprised to know that new runtime, intended for desktop use, starts a separate process for each widget. Thus if a widget were to crash, the rest of your widgets, and your Opera browser simply continues to run.

You can try this new alpha release from the Opera Desktop team blog, be sure to understand this is an early preview, features might disappear or get added and stability might suffer. Don't forget to give the Opera developers feedback on this latest build.