When Opera introduced Speed Dial into their browser I didn't realize quite how big of a hit it would become. Now most browsers are shipping with some sort of iteration of this feature that is capable of showing thumbnail previews for the sites you frequently visit. It's basically a visual way to view your favorite sites.

The last time we did a report on the operating system and browser stats was back in January 2009. In January Chrome was starting to take off as it passed 1% market share, and both Windows and Internet Explorer suffered some big blows as their competition scooped up some of their precious users.

Today Apple kind of took everyone by surprise when they released a big milestone for the Safari browser. The new Safari 4 Beta from Apple borrows some ideas from their competition, and they spiced it up a bit with some fancy graphics. This is most notably seen in the "Top Sites" screen as seen in the image above.

I really love the Google Chrome browser, but it seems as though the development team has been overlooking a huge security issue that I thought would be resolved by now. If you save passwords in the browser (like a lot of other users do) you may find out the hard way that the passwords are not stored in a manor that would keep other people from quickly accessing the data.

The last time we did a report on the operating system and browser stats was back in October 2008. At the time Google Chrome was just starting to gain some traction, and it was still too early to tell whether Apple's new MacBooks would help them attract new users to their platform.

There has been more talk about web browsers in the last few weeks than any time I can remember in the past. Google Chrome came out of the Beta phase, Opera unveiled the first Alpha release of version 10, Internet Explorer 8 is suspected to have a 3rd Beta coming in the next month, and Firefox 3.1 Beta 2 was just unveiled.

I've been waiting to see what Opera had in store for us in version 10, and it looks like everyone is finally getting a peak. In fact I'm a bit surprised by what has been revealed so far, but in a good way. For awhile it seemed like other browsers were trying to find their own ways to adopt features that were first introduced in Opera, but the opposite never really happened.

Having toolbars in a browser can be both frustrating and convenient. On one hand they can often cram a lot of useful functionality into a small area, but on the other hand they eat up precious space that could be used for viewing websites. After all, we know what your browser can look like when you've installed a few too many toolbars.

It's been a few months since we last wrote about the browser and operating system stats, but that doesn't mean they haven't been on our minds. In fact the market has changed a little bit since our last report in July 2008.

Mozilla has decided that in Firefox 3.1 they want users to have a fresh new way to switch between tabs in a browser window. That's why they've come up with a system that resembles Apple's Cover Flow for moving from one tab to another. What if you want a bit more eye candy though?