opera

Opera continues updating the "Mini" version of its mobile browser for Android phones with some noticeable tweaks and enhancements.

The Wednesday release of Opera Mini 5.1 for Android brings sundry features such as setting Opera Mini as the default browser, and seeing the entire screen when you switch to full-screen mode.

The best addition is that Opera Mini can save your session within an hour of starting it, if the browser accidentally closes while working in the background. This is a similar provision to the session restore in Opera Mini for the iPhone.

Opera Mini 5.1 … Read more

Opera surprised the mobile world when it overhauled its Opera Mini browser for Java phones last September. The tremendous improvement brought the browser a more attractive interface and sophisticated features, like tabbed browsing.

On Thursday, the browser company released an update to Opera Mini for select Nokia phones.

Opera Mini 5.1 tweaks the browser skin to allow more Web pages to be open simultaneously. Back-end updates have addressed scrolling speed in particular and processing speed overall.

In a press release, Opera "highly" recommends the update for handsets with limited memory or smaller screen sizes. The update targets … Read more

Opera browser users will be pleased to know that the beta released two weeks ago, Opera 10.6, is coming your way in full force in a general release this Thursday. Version 10.6 incorporates an anti-malware detection system powered by AVG, more HTML5 capabilities, and improved performance overall.

In other upgrade news, Trillian (current version), the all-in-one instant messaging program, will soon be replacing what we think is a jarring, outmoded interface with a sleeker, more modern skin. The upcoming Trillian 5 is optimized for Windows 7 and will also include mobile-syncing features and an array of new social-networking … Read more

Opera 10 maintains the program's tradition of striving for the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. Opera covers the basics with tabbed browsing, mouse-over previews, a customizable search bar, advanced bookmarking tools, and simple integration with e-mail and chat clients. Mouse-gesture support, keyboard shortcuts, and drag-and-drop functionality round out the essentials. Opera 10.52 marked the Mac debut of the Carakan JavaScript engine, which the publisher claims is 10 times faster than the previous version. Even in the middle of benchmarking tests, that claim doesn't seem far-fetched.

Opera 10.60 is a minor update to Opera 10.… Read more

Opera 10 maintains the program's tradition of striving to be the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. In this latest iteration, Opera replaced its JavaScript engine, remade the interface for Windows 7, and developed features that have solidified the company's position as an innovator.

Opera 10.60 is a minor update to Opera 10.50, which introduced multiple new features. The biggest is one most users won't see: Opera's in-house anti-malware has been bolstered by AVG's real-time threat detection network. The browser uses it to force users to see a warning page when they … Read more

Updated at 2:12 p.m. on July 1: Opera spokesman Thomas Ford said in an e-mail to me that he's "almost certain" that Opera's new AVG anti-malware detection system replaces the previous one that Opera used, which had been provided by Haute Secure.

The first beta of Opera 10.60 was released only two weeks ago, and on Thursday it graduates to a wide release and sheds its beta tag. Opera 10.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux incorporates security enhancements provided by popular freeware antivirus vendor AVG, improves performance, adds further HTML5 compatibility, and … Read more

On the heels of the latest Opera beta debuting last week, the stable version of Opera has been updated to incorporate several security fixes. Available for Windows and Mac, Opera 10.54 includes five security-related repairs, but the company has only fully disclosed the nature of one of them. In addition to the security repairs, the Mac version received multiple non-security bug fixes.

The one security fix that Opera disclosed information about concerns a hole it had rated "extremely severe." The bug was actually on Windows systems that allowed font handling to be used as an exploit vector. … Read more

Updated 5:40 p.m. PST on Wednesday, June 16, 2010, to clarify benchmark information and add CNET benchmarks.

Opera has released its latest browser betas that emphasize speed improvements and better HTML5 compliance. Opera 10.60 for Windows, Mac, and Linux gives fans of the alternative Web browser a bucketload of HTML5-related improvements, along with the claim that the company has made the browser 50 percent faster than the previous version.

  Opera 10.60 beta 1 should be 50 percent faster than the current stable Opera, version 10.53, when tested on the Peacekeeper test, an Opera representative … Read more

Mozilla released a new Firefox 4 prototype late Monday that builds in support for Google's WebM video technology and several other changes planned for the open-source Web browser's next major version.

With WebM, Google hopes to liberate Web video from patent-related royalty constraints of today's prevailing video compression technology, H.264. Mozilla and Google are working to make WebM's VP8 codec a standard part of the new specification for built-in video being added to the HTML5 Web page design technology.

But the situation is complicated: Apple prefers the H.264 codec and has built that codec into its Safari browser, and Microsoft is doing so with IE9, its upgrade to Internet Explorer now under development. Google's Chrome is supporting both H.264 and WebM, whose video codec is called VP8.

Lending a bit of weight to the Mozilla and Google camp is Opera Software, the fifth-ranked browser in terms of share of usage. On Monday, it released an Opera developer version that adds WebM support among various other HTML5 additions.

The browser market is feistier than it's been in more than a decade. Back in the 1990s, the competition came down to Netscape vs. Microsoft. This time around, Netscape's Navigator has morphed into Mozilla's Firefox, Apple has launched five versions of Safari, Opera has kept the pressure on the bigger players, Google has entered the market with Chrome, and, most recently, Microsoft has fired up IE development after a long period of quasi-dormancy. … Read more