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.