We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps.
Opera is joyfully celebrating the 40th birthday of Jon Von Tetzchner, their founder and CEO. The Register recently interviewed him where he chatted about Opera’s success...particularly in the mobile browser market. As it stands right now Opera has some big releases shipping within the next week!
Pretty soon Firefox 3 is going to be feature complete, and all that will be left for them to do is fine-tune the things they have implemented. As we build up to that big moment there are some new features that are coming out of the shop for testers.
Earlier this weekend Mozilla released Firefox 3 Alpha 7 to the public. According to the original development cycle we were supposed to be onto the Beta builds already, but Mozilla has run into some setbacks...particularly with performance. They are still continuing on their 6-week release schedule, and here’s what’s changed in the latest version:
One of the requests that I frequently receive with every Firefox 3 Alpha release is to put together a portable build that people can play with. That way they don’t need to worry about messing up their existing Firefox installation or profile, and when they have had enough with it they can simply delete the folder it resides in.
For the last few weeks I’ve made Firefox 3 nightly releases my primary browser because my extensions all work well with it.
The day for the first milestone of Firefox 3 has already arrived! That's right, Firefox 3 Alpha 1 can be downloaded off of the FTP server but at this time they only have the English version posted. I expect that other languages will be following very shortly so this will be the downloader for those versions, but as of right now only the English-US version is available:
