We already witnessed the release of the new Opera 9.5 client and will see the release of Firefox 3 on Tuesday and Internet Explorer 8 later this year. The interesting aspect is in my opinion if any of the clients manages to grab market share from the others. Will Opera finally gain the recognition that it deserves or will it remain an insider tip supported by a loyal group of fans ?

What about Firefox 3 ? Will it continue to drive market shares away from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or will the expansion stop eventually ? And then we have the Internet Explorer 8 which has such a huge market share mainly because it’s bundled with the operating system. Will Internet Explorer 8 be able to stop the fall ?

Here is what I think will happen. Opera will not gain a huge market share and remain a niche browser. It’s a wonderful browser but it is somehow not accepted by the mass market. Firefox will gain some momentum and market shares from Microsoft but it won’t be able to drive Internet Explorer from its throne yet.

continue reading "Which will it be ? Opera ? Firefox ? IE ?"

Opera fans rejoice. After a seemingly endless series of Beta versions and one release candidate the Opera developer team has finally uploaded Opera 9.5 final to the ftp site. The release is available in English and for International users and cannot be downloaded from anywhere else currently. The homepage still states coming soon which will probably change later this day.

Here are the download links for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

The build number of the Windows release is 10063. It comes a bit as a surprise after the recent release of the first release candidate of Opera 9.5. There cannot be a lot of changes between this version and the release candidate earlier this week. As always there is no information yet on the changes, think we just have to wait a bit longer for the official release announcement.

continue reading "Opera 9.5 final released"

The default way of displaying the toolbars in Opera might be confusing to users who are used to working with Firefox or Internet Explorer. The bookmarks toolbar and tab bar are located above the address bar. As you might know Firefox and Internet Explorer are displaying the address bar on top and the tab bar and bookmarks toolbar below it.

That’s an rather unusual layout at first and many users will be devastated once they realize that they cannot change the order of the toolbars in Opera. It is still possible to arrange the elements of the toolbars but not the toolbars themselves. That’s the whole trick. To do that right-click a toolbar and select customize from the menu.

continue reading "Move the Opera Address Bar to the Top"

Finally. That was my first thought when I read the announcement over at the Opera Desktop Team blog that they released a release candidate of Opera 9.5 which can be downloaded for all supported operating systems including Windows, Linux and Macintosh. Windows users should take note that this release candidate will replace the default installation of Opera.

Opera has a very dedicated userbase for a very long time and I personally think that the browser deserves a larger market share so that it would at least be on pair with Internet Explorer and Firefox. If you have not updated Opera for a while you will notice that it comes with a shiny new skin.

continue reading "Opera 9.5 Release Candidate"

RSS Feeds are slowly taking the place of the good old bookmarks at least when you take a look at how computer geeks use the Internet. Not everything can be managed with RSS Feeds though and bookmarks are still an important way to keep track of interesting websites. The major problem is that bookmarks do not get verified automatically after adding them to the browser. No browser yet supports the feature to automatically check the bookmarks. (I think a Firefox add-on can do that)

AM-DeadLink is a third party software that can check the bookmarks of all major browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Mozilla) as well as url files, comma separated and tab delimited files. The Internet Explorer bookmarks are discovered automatically while all others have to be manually selected from the hard drive. The selections will be remembered in the future.

The main purpose of AM-DeadLink is to check all bookmarks. Error codes and additional information are displayed during and after the check and the dead bookmarks can be checked manually by opening them in the default browser or viewed internally. Favicons can be downloaded optionally if desired during the check.

continue reading "Check Dead Bookmarks in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer"