I have gone and put Opera 9.64, Opera 10 Alpha, and Opera 10 Beta 1 through the Acid 3 test, V8 Benchmark, and SunSpider Benchmark tools to see how the new browser is stacking up.
The results are pleasing, with the browser clearly heading in the correct direction. Graphed results are below.
On schedule Microsoft has released the final wave of language packs for Internet Explorer 8, with the browser now available in 63 languages.
New languages included in this wave are Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi (India), Tamil, Telugu, Uzbek (Latin).
The language packs can be downloaded from the Internet Explorer website.
Opera has released Opera 10 beta to the public following months of development from the alpha version.
The new browser includes a new interface, visual tabs, Opera Turbo for fast browsing on slow connections, customisable speed dial, and a whole lot more.
A full list of changes can be found in the changelog, and the new release can be downloaded from the beta homepage.
Opera Mobile is now the most used mobile browser world wide according to SiteCounter for the month of May.
Opera Mobile took the lead for the month with 24.6% of the worldwide market compared to 22.3% for the iPhone. This statistic is a little misleading however, as with iPod touch added to the total, it comes to 37.32% market share.
Nokia came in third for the month with 17.9% market share.
Browser market share results have been released for May 2009 thanks to Market Share by Net Applications, and no surprises as Microsoft Internet Explorer loose another 0.5% of it’s market share, dropping back to 65%.
Firefox had a steady month, still with its 22.5% share. Apple’s Safari has jumped from 8.2% to 8.4% this month, while Google Chrome has seen a jump from 1.4% to 1.8%.
Opera has also stayed steady, with 0.7% of the pie. Microsoft should be concerning, with the recent release of Internet Explorer 8 hoping to patch the trickle of users flocking to other browsers.
The full detailed statistics for May’s results are available online.
Latest news coming from the European Union’s (EU) anti-trust case against the bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows suggests that one possible remedy could be the inclusion of other browsers in an installation of Windows.
The move could potentially see Opera Browser, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome bundled with Windows in Europe with the user being asked which browser they would like to set as their default on first run.
Any ruling against Microsoft would see a solution that “would be based on the fundamental principle of unbiased choice” said a EU spokesperson. Microsoft has said they they will comply with any ruling. A final decision is due in the next few months.
Microsoft has confirmed to Silverlight 3 beta testers that Silverlight 3 will be released to the public on July 10th, much earlier than the original expected date of Q4 2009.
Silverlight 3 adds many new features, including 3D support, local graphics acceleration, and H.264 video.
Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Adobe AIR and Flash, and is available on PC and Mac. The current beta can be downloaded from Microsoft.
With the release of Google Chrome 2 just out the door, Google has started work on Chrome 3, with the latest developer build being version 3.0.182.2.
The latest development build fixes a few bugs, as well as adding new features. A full list of changes can be found in the release notes.
Users wanting to test out this release can change their browser to the developer channel.
With Firefox 3.5 nearing completion, it has been revealed that many of the icons is Firefox 3.5 are being refreshed and updated.
Across all 4 platforms, around 25 icons are being tweaked or are entirely new, such as the geolocation icons.
The new icons are available now in the latest nightly builds, but will be included in any Release Candidates and the final release of 3.5
The latest development snapshot of Opera 10 contains a new skin for the browser, which appears to have its base from the Google Chrome skin.
Along with the new release, the Opera team have noticed that reaching version 10 has become a problem, with some high profile sites detecting the user string as version 1. To solve this Opera have temporarily changed the user agent string to read “Opera/9.80 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.2.15 Version/10.00”.
A full list of changes and download links can be found in Opera Desktop Team blog.