Archive for the ‘Opera’ Category

It has been a good month for the ‘underdogs’ in the browser wars this month, with Firefox, Safari and Chrome all gaining ground.

Firefox has hit a fantastic milestone, now with over 20% of the web browser market, up 4% from last month. Apple’s Safari has climbed to just over 7%, up 8.5% from last month.

Even Google’s Chrome has crawled back some ground, after a steady drop off rate from the browsers first month. Chrome gained around 12% during the month, taking it’s total share to just under 1%.

The losers this month were both Opera and Internet Explorer. Opera lost 5% of it’s market, and is now 5th in the race, behind Google Chrome. November also saw Internet Explorer’s market share plummet below 70% for the first time since 1999.

You can view the full report at the Market Share website. Historical data can be sourced from Wikipedia. The browser wars are really firing up.

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Next generation releases of both Firefox and Opera will incorporate the royalty free Theora video codec.

The lossy video compression technology uses only has a small CPU footprint and will allow videos to be viewed in the browser without the use of a Flash player, or any other additional codecs installed.

Wikipedia however has been using the Theora codec for video for a while now. Kat Walsh, a Wikimedia Foundation board member believes “open media formats are critical for ensuring a future where everyone can create and share media freely”.

This is fantastic news for users. If Safari and Microsoft get on board, the future will be looking quite bright.

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It looks like we won’t see a browser war for the iPhone just yet, with Apple refusing to let Opera Mini be released for the iPhone.

Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, Opera’s co-founder and chief executive said that “Opera’s engineers have developed a version of Opera Mini that can run on an Apple iPhone, but Apple won’t let the company release it because it competes with Apple’s own Safari browser.”

Opera Mini is currently available for free for many other phones available today.

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After the much anticipated release of Opera 9.6 a few weeks ago, Opera has released it’s first update for the 9.6 code branch.

Opera 9.61 addresses a few issues, including a problem with Opera Link which would cause duplicate enteries to appear. Several security flaws have also been fixed.

You can download the new version from the Opera website and you can see a full list of changes in the changelog.

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Fennec Acid3 Results

Fennec Acid3 Results

Mozilla has been working hard on it’s mobile version of Firefox dubbed Fennec. Building on top of Firefox 3’s reduced memory footprint, Mozilla is aiming to bring the desktop browsing experience to your mobile.

With the hastened development, the latest version of Fennec scores a very impressive 88/100 in the Acid3 test on Windows Mobile. In comparison Firefox 3 only scores 71/100, while Opera 9.6 scores 85/100.

Once released, Fennec is sure to set the mobile browser market on fire, giving stiff competition to already established browsers such as Opera Mobile. It’s sure to be an interesting year ahead for the mobile browser market.

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Mashable has posted a great article with 25 resources on how to customise your favorite browser.

Included are resources for Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome.

You can read the full article on the Mashable website.

Happy customising!

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Opera has just released version 9.6 of its web browser. The new version comes about after weeks of testing, with the beta release was available almost a month ago.

Opera 9.6 includes a new feed view, speed enchancements, and Opera link technology.

A full list of changes can be found in the changelogs.

You can download Opera 9.6 from the Opera website.

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With all the news that Google Chrome’s market share has droped since it’s release, I thought it was only fitting to add some more statistics to the fire.

On another technology site that I run, browser stats were as follows for the month of September:

Browser Market Share for September

Browser Market Share for September

Through the month of September, Chrome’s usage has dropped around 30% from its release. Usage seems to have stabalised since then.

Of interesting note, is that Google Chrome has still gained a larger market share than Opera. It should also be noted that Chrome is still only available on Windows. Perhaps it’s market share will again increase when offical Mac and Linux versions are released.

Perhaps Google Chrome hasn’t shaken up the market as much as everyone predicted. Did you try Google Chrome and are you still using it?

Opera has released a beta version of its next generation web browser. The browser includes some fancy new features, including Link It. Link It allows you to synchronise searches and typed history across multiple computers. You can read a full list of changes in their changelogs.

Included in the release is a new version of Opera Mail. You can download the new beta software from the Opera Software website. Happy testing!

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