Opera have announced that Opera 10 was downloaded over 10 million times in the first week since the browser was released.

An impressive feat for the company, but it seems small in size. Apple’s Safari 4 was downloaded 11 million times in 3 days, while Firefox 3.5 was downloaded over 5 million times in 24 hours.

More information can be read in the Opera press release.

Mozilla has posted a new roadmap, outlining the future for Firefox in the next 12 months. At this stage, Firefox 4.0 is due to hit somewhere between September and November 2010 according to the roadmap.

New features for Firefox 4 are said to include platform enhancements, including running tabs in separate processes, interface enhancements, and speed and responsiveness improvements.

Also on the roadmap are Firefox 3.6 and Firefox 3.7, due October or November 2009 and February or March 2010 respectively.

Firefox 3.6 is aiming to include Windows 7 enhancements, including Jump Lists and Aero Peak. The browser is also expected to include light weight themes (persona’s) and big improvements to the Tracemonkey JavaScript engine.

Firefox 3.7 is biggest draw card is each add-on will be placed in its own process, making the overall browser experience more stable (especially with poorly written add-on’s). This release should also see some form of bookmark syncronisation.

The next 12 months are looking bright for Firefox, with some great new features expected.

This months browser share statistics are out thanks to Market Share by Net Applications.

August has panned out like another typical month, with Internet Explorer dropping to 66.97% in August, from 67.68% in July.

Firefox jumped slightly to 22.98% from 22.47%, while Safari remained the same at 4.07%.

Google Chrome also increased its share from 2.59% to 2.84%, while Opera was also up from 1.97% to 2.04%.

Opera have released Opera 10, after releasing Opera 10 Alpha 1 way back in December 2008.

“Opera 10 showcases a sleek new design coupled with our new Turbo technology, which keeps Web pages loading lightning fast, even if your connection slows down” says the spiel on Opera’s homepage.

Other new features include an in-line spell check, full Acid3 compliance and mouse gestures.

A full run down on features and download links for Windows, OS X, and Linux can be found on the Opera 10 site.

The Chrom dev team have finally released early builds of Google Chrome for Mac.

The builds, which are still only in the dev channel, is now stable on Mac, but is still lacking features with the dev team not recommending the browser for every day use.

“Google Chrome for Mac OS X Developer Release is a very early release version and does not yet have some of the functionality that a full general release version would have. Many of the features still under development affect the privacy behavior of Google Chrome for Mac OS X. The issues marked in bold text below will be resolved prior to releasing Google Chrome for Mac OS X to the beta channel for broader consumer use” says the note from Google.

A download link is available from the Early Access Release Channels on the Chromium website.

The Opera desktop team have released a final release candidate for Opera 10. Release candidate 2 fixes a few bugs that caused the browser to crash, and a bug that caused pages to never stop loading.

A full list of changes plus download links can be found on the Opera Desktop Team’s blog.

A final release is due out tomorrow, September 1st US time.

Google has fixed 3 Chrome security holes, two which were rated as high severity, and the other as medium.

The first issue was in the V8 JavaScript engine, which could “allow specially-crafted Javascript on a web page to read unauthorized memory, bypassing security checks.”

The second issue allows poorly formed XML to crash the browser tab. “A malicious XML payload may be able to trigger a use-after-free condition. Other tabs are unaffected.”

The final bug could allow “sites whose certificates are signed using MD2 or MD4 hashing algorithms … to spoof an invalid site as a valid HTTPS site.”

Thankfully, none of these risks were rated as critical thanks to Google Chrome’s sandbox environment. The update will be pushed out to all current Chrome users.

Opera 10.0 Release Candidate is here, and according to Opera’s Desktop Team, this release “should be considered to be in a stable state code-wise, and that only selected fixes will be added if necessary.”

The release includes a bunch of bug fixes, includes a new logo, and is now around 40% faster than Opera 9.6 thanks to the new Preston rendering engine.

Downloads for Windows, Mac and Linux are available from the Opera Next website.

Opera 10 final is due on September 1st.

The Mozilla Mobile team have reached another milestone, releasing Beta 3 of the Fennec browser for Maemo based Nokia phones.

“We’ve made big improvements to kinetic panning and added the ability to scroll iframes. A lot of work has been done to make our theme more robust, taking advantage of things like media queries to support various devices, orientations, and platforms which you’ll see more of in the next Windows Mobile release. Overall, this beta is a major improvement to previous Fennec betas” said Stuart Parmenter, Mozilla’s director of mobile engineering.

Full details of all changes, plus download links can be found in the release notes.

Google Chrome 4.0.202.2 is now completely 64 bit compatible, and no longer uses any 32 bit libraries and is available for Linux.

“The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port.  After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I’ve had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks” said Google Chrome Software Engineer Dean McNamee.

The new builds can be downloaded from here, with build instructions also being available for Linux users.

A Windows and Mac version are set to follow.