The long-awaited Google Talk for iPhone is finally available, and it's not in the form of an iPhone application. Instead, it's simply a browser app which makes us wonder why it took Google over a year to make something for the iPhone.

Now that the month of June has wrapped up we can see what browsers and operating systems have emerged as victorious. In both segments Microsoft is still dominating the market according to Net Applications, but there are some competitors that continue to crawl up behind them. In fact both Windows and Internet Explorer dropped in market share for June 2008.

In the last week we've seen two major browsers, Firefox (review) and Opera, release huge milestones for their desktop software. Just five days after the release of Opera 9.5 they are reporting that there have been an astounding 4.7 million downloads of the browser, thereby averaging almost a million downloads per day.

I never thought Opera was going to make this possible, but I'm pleased to say that in the new Opera 9.5 you can actually customize how many Speed Dial entries are shown at any one given time! They are so incredibly useful that I've found myself needing more than the nine that comes standard in the browser.

So it was just announced that Firefox 3.0 will be coming on Tuesday, but lets not get ahead of ourselves... Opera 9.5 is here today! The Opera team has worked tirelessly to bring you the next generation browser that millions of people will find comfort in using, and what they have to show for their work is something they can really be proud of.

Win; Mac; Linux Hot on the heels of Firefox 3, the Opera team announced today that they are preparing for the launch of Opera 9.5, and they are doing so by shooting out the first (and possibly last) Release Candidate to the public. This comes just about one week after they added a new default theme to the browser.

Opera announced today that they have partnered with Haute Secure to include top-notch threat protection in their next-generation browser. A new snapshot of Opera 9.5 was posted yesterday that was bundled with a new theme, but the integration with Haute does not appear to be in place yet.

The Opera browser has been prancing around with the same ol' theme for several years now, which can easily be seen from our look back at older versions of popular browsers. Needless to say a makeover has been long overdue, and it's now here! The new theme is dubbed Sharp, and is currently available in the latest snapshot release of Opera 9.5.

Win; Mac; Linux If you have ever switched to a new operating system you know how tricky it can be to find certain applications to replace the ones that you had. That's why today we wanted to point out five excellent BitTorrent solutions that each run on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

We're almost halfway through the year, and it looks as though Internet Explorer is once again continuing its steady decline in usage.

Google Gears, now known as simply "Gears," entered the browser scene last year about this time. One of their goals was to provide a way for web applications to interact naturally with the desktop, and provide a way for web applications to come offline. It's done well over the last year and many people have embraced it.

One thing that Google is quite adamant on is making sure that you're using a browser they officially support, and more times than not Opera users are left in the dark. The new Gmail interface is no exception. If you try visiting the email service in Opera you'll be forced to use the old-school version of Gmail that doesn't have color-coded labels, among other things.

Keyboard shortcuts step aside! Mouse gestures have been around for quite some time, and are often used as a way to quickly issue commands. One of the places that these are used the most is in the web browser, and that's because a lot of repetitive actions are performed there. Just think about how many times each day you click the back or refresh buttons.

Win; Mac; Linux Opera is obviously not content with sitting on the sidelines when it comes to being the fastest browser out there. Back in February Mozilla decided that it was time to optimize it's JavaScript performance, and used a technique called Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) that gave it a nice boost.

Last week we took a look at where the various browsers stood up against each other in terms of market share. I was shocked (to say the least) when Internet Explorer triumphantly came out on top with a 1.22% market share increase. That really hit hard for Firefox who's market share was sent spiraling down to 16.96%, which was nearly a percent lower than the previous month.

Opera Dragonfly is here, and as expected it is a new set of tools to help developers create functional websites. It's obvious that the Opera team wanted to develop something to draw developers to their browser, much like how Firebug has become an irreplaceable tool for the developers that use Firefox. The real question is whether Dragonfly is the tool we've been longing for?

And so April 2008 has come to an end, which means it's time to take a look at how the browsers stack up against each other once again. Who's rising, who's falling, and who can't catch a break? I think some of the stats might surprise you!

If you're using Firefox there is a very good chance that you've heard of the IE Tab extension. For many of us it helped ease the burden of switching to Firefox as the primary browser back when developers didn't see Firefox as a viable alternative. That is not nearly as big of a problem as it once was.

One thing that I'm always careful about backing up is my browser's profile. There is a lot of information stored in there, and it would be a real shame if I lost it all. If you're running Opera then you're in for a real treat with this backup utility. OperaFly is a nifty little free program that runs on Windows.

The number of phishing attempts continues to grow each year and really has gotten out of hand.  In fact, Wikipedia says that about 100 billion spam messages (as of June 2007) are sent each and every single day. To put this into perspective, that accounts for about 80-85% of all incoming messages that a user receives in a days time.