The new version of Opera 11.60 is already available on the official Opera website. Existing Opera users can consult the release notes for their operating system to find out what’s new in the release.

When you look at the changes you will notice that Opera has packed a lot of them in the release. Opera Mail users will find that the mail client has received a redesigned interface. New features include automatic mail grouping by date, pinning of messages which corresponds to Imap’s flagged feature and Gmail’s starred message feature, a new settings dialog and two lined message lists.

New HTML5 and CSS technologies have been implemented in the browser. This includes the HTML5 parsing algorithm, HTML5 audio and video attributes such as preload or muted, HTML5 microdata support, HTML5 custom scheme and content handler support, ECMA Script 5.1 support, XMLHttpRequest Level 2 support, full support for radial-gradient and repeated-radial-gradiant as well as support for applying image-rendering properties to HTML contents.

Dozens of bugs and issues have been fixed in Opera 11.60. This includes problems opening the Google Mail inbox, a mouse gestures crash, a 100% cpu usage on subpages of the Cisco domain or an inline find crash.

The security section lists five security related issues that have been fixed in the new version of the web browser.

It is recommended to upgrade Opera stable versions to the latest version as soon as possible.

You can read the announcement over at the Opera Desktop Team blog.

A recent post on the Mozilla Identity team blog revealed that Mozilla was working on BrowserID during that time. The organization plans to deploy BrowserID on all Mozilla web sites in the coming months.

Let me give you a quick fresh up. BrowserID steps away from the username and password log ins on today’s Internet. It instead concentrates on email addresses, and in this particular case on verifiable addresses.

If a user can verify their email address, they can as well use the account linked to that email address. That’s the basic idea. The technology that powers BrowserID uses a public private key system.

Some of the benefits should be obvious. User’s can register and log in more easily on web sites that support the new sign in system.

In the case of Mozilla and Mozilla owned web sites, users need one BrowserID account instead of multiple accounts that may even use different passwords. Even better, they only need their email address to log in and not a password.

The core difference to other sign-on systems like OpenID, Twitter, Facebook Connect, Google or Yahoo is that the identity provider will not be involved directly in the login process. In addition, data is not shared between sites. That’s great from a privacy perspective.

In addition, users can link multiple email accounts to their BrowserID account which makes it possible to use different email addresses for specific web sites.

It remains to be seen if other sites and services will implement BrowserID as one or even the only sign on system. More information are available at the Mozilla Identity blog.

NotScripts is available for Opera 11.10 or newer. the installation process is a bit on the complicated side. Here are the instructions on how to install NotScripts correctly.

• Install the extension. You can install the latest NotScripts version right from the Opera Extensions repository.
• Close the Opera window and re-open Opera.
• Click the NotScripts button in the Opera toolbar.
  It would show you a message saying you to set User JS Storage Quota to 5000. Click the message and it will take you to the ‘User JS Storage Quota’ setting.
• Change the value of the setting from 0 to 5000.
• Click the Save button. You might need to scroll down to find the Save button.
• You may need to restart the Opera browser before the changes take effect.

Opera’s Notscript, unlike NoScript comes with three different script blocking mode. The default mode is whitelist which blocks all scripts except those that are run from whitelisted domains. Blacklist, the other option allows all scripts by default and blocks only scripts on a user maintained blacklist (much like the Firefox add-on YesScript). The last mode Whitelist + Same Origin uses the whitelist approach to block all scripts but allows scripts running on the same domain the user is on automatically.

So more choice in this regard which is really nice. When you visit a site you need to click on the NotScript icon to display the list of blocked scripts. There is no indicator that scripts where blocked which is probably the biggest usability issue. A click on the icon displays the scripts which options to allow, block or temporarily allow them individually.

If you run the blacklist mode (allow all scripts except selected ones) then you see a script listing similar to that on the screenshot above. The blue action is the current one for that script on that particular site. Just like with NoScript you can allow all scripts, globally allow all temporarily until revoked or temporarily allow the shown scripts.

NotScript seems to work considerably well. I have two big gripes with it. First the missing notification as it is a guess game if a script has been blocked or not and second that the developer has not updated the script in a while (the last update dates back to April 2011).

The extension itself works and that’s the most important aspect obviously. It is not a 100% port of NoScript but a port that brings the most important feature of the Firefox security extension to Opera. For that, it is highly recommended to be installed.

An alternative to that is the Opera NoScript Alternative BlockIt which I have reviewed in the linked article.

The core difference between two mobile browser versions is how Opera Turbo is handled in the browser. Opera Turbo is Opera’s compression service that reduces the size of web pages by sending the data through an Opera server where they are compressed before they are send to the user’s mobile device.

Smaller data packages means faster page loading times and a reduced bandwidth bill for users who pay by the Megabyte.

Opera Mini 6.5 is now available for new devices (The Android version has been out for a few weeks) including Apple iOS, Symbian, Blackberry and J2ME devices. The big new feature in Opera Mini 6.5 and Opera Mobile 11.5 is a new data counter that allows mobile users to keep tabs on their bandwidth usage. While that may not be exciting for users with flatrates, it may very well make a big difference for consumers who pay by the Megabyte (or capped data plans).

Other improvements include stability and performance fixes, better text selection and auto-correct and spell-check support for iOS devices. Interested users can read up on all the changes at the official Opera Mini blog post.

A blog post over at the Opera Mobile blog informs users about the changes in the release (please note that Opera Mobile 11.5 has been available for some time for Android based devices on the Android Market)

Opera Mobile 11.5 introduces the data usage view on Symbian devices. The new version benefits from an Opera Presto rendering engine upgrade as well.

Opera Mobile users on Symbian devices can access the changelog here. Symbian users can point their browsers to m.opera.com to download the latest version of the Opera Mobile or Opera Mini browser. Browsers may also be available in the Apple App Store and on Android Market.

Opera Reader is an experimental Opera version that does away with all the scrolling on the Internet. It’s premise is to display all contents of a website directly on the screen. It basically breaks down a website into pages that are displayed just like the pages of a book. The developers have used a scroll and book comparison to highlight the differences. Scrolls are like standard websites that go on and on until the content ends, while books use pages that offer several advantages over scrolls.

Opera Reader turns scrolls (aka scrolling web pages) into books (aka paged web pages). Whenever you open a compatible web page in Opera Reader, you will notice that all of its contents are displayed on the screen without horizontal or vertical scrollbars. Here is how a compatible page looks in the standard Opera browser and in Opera Reader.

The core difference is the missing scrollbar. Opera Reader users can use the mouse to flip pages. Alternatives including using the keyboard (left and right) or gestures on touch enabled devices.

Separating a website into pages does not reduce the browser’s functionality at all. It is still possible to search, print or work with the whole web page like it would be in a standard version of Opera.

The Opera team has published a few examples on the Opera Reader website. This includes a basic newspaper, the novels Oliver Twist and Alice in Wonderland and a sample Wikipedia page.

The biggest issue with Opera Reader in its current form is that websites need to add specific CSS3 code to support the feature. Opera needs to come up with a way to automate the processing of web pages in Opera Reader. If the company manages to do that, it could change the way we read contents on the web forever.

Opera Reader is currently available as a preview version for Windows, Mac, Linux and Android devices. Interested users can download the preview release from the official project website over at Opera. (via)

If you have followed Windows 8 news you know that the operating system will ship with two different versions of Internet Explorer. Both use the same core but are different in many regards otherwise. Users can access the standard Internet Explorer 10 browser from the desktop, or the Metro Internet Explorer when they are in the Metro interface of the system. The core difference? Metro Internet Explorer has been optimized for touch based devices like tablets. The browser is started in fullscreen automatically and uses a minimalistic interface with barely any user interface elements.

MetroIE, available in an early beta version, ports that version of Internet Explorer to the Windows 7 operating system. It seems that users need to have the latest version of Internet Explorer 10 which is currently available as a developer preview. IE 10 final will ship with the Windows 8 operating system.

The web browser is only available for Windows 7 and Windows 8, which explains why MetroIE is also only compatible with Windows 7 and not Vista or XP.

MetroIE is a small portable file that Windows 7 users can run to get the metro style Internet Explorer 10 browser on their system. The browser starts in fullscreen and looks in many regards like the original available in Microsoft’s Windows 8 Developer Preview. Here is a fullscreen screenshot of the browser in action.

Users basically have access to the address bar and a few basic browser controls after the browser is started. It does away with the taskbar and other elements of the Windows desktop. Users who want to exit the fullscreen mode need to right-click the address bar and select exit from the context menu. Pressing the Windows button switches to the desktop where everything is available again.

It happened once that the address bar disappeared and that I had to kill the process using the Windows Task Manager. From a user’s perspective, it is safe to say that most Windows 7 users won’t like the slim web browser as it is time consuming to switch back to the standard desktop. It may have its uses on kiosk PCs or public PCs where users need to be limited though.

Windows 7 users can download the latest beta of MetroIE from the developer’s Deviant Art website. The application is part of the developer’s bigger Origami project which tries to port the Windows 8 start screen in metro style to the Windows 7 desktop. (via)

Depending on your personal preferences, you may want to enable none or some of the experiments in Google Chrome. The list of available settings is large, which is why I will look at only a handful of experiments that have been added to the flags listing in recent time.

• Smooth Scrolling – Chrome users up until now had to install extensions like Smooth Scroller if they experienced scrolling issues in the Chrome web browser. With the Smooth Scrolling flag, they now can enable the feature natively.
• Lazy Background Pages – All extension background pages are loaded when the browser starts. This setting changes the default behavior so that they are loaded when needed.
• New Apps Install Bubble – When you install a new application in Chrome a new tab page is opened automatically. This can be irritating if you install many apps in the browser. This new flag changes the behavior by showing a bubble pointing at the new tab page instead.

• Enable NTP bookmark features – The new tab page in Chrome currently only lists the most visited sites and apps in its interface. This setting enables a Bookmark page on the new tab page.

• Enable syncing open tabs, syncing search engines – The two options can be used to sync both all open tabs and all custom search engines with all connected Chrome browsers.
• Enable shortcuts in the omnibox – Remembers autocomplete results and offers those the next time the same search term is typed in the Chrome address box

Chrome users find several useful experiments on the flags page that can change the behavior of the Chrome browser noticeable. Are you a Chrome user? If so, are you making use of experimental features in the web browser? (thanks Vineeth)

FeatureFix is a Firefox add-on that tries to resolve several issues that Firefox users may experience. When you first install the add-on and look at its options you will notice that the tweaks and fixes are sorted into four different pages there. Each page lists multiple configuration options.

Here is a list of some of the configuration options that FeatureFix provides:

• Change the default Firefox source code viewer
• Define where the tab bar close button or buttons are located in the browser (every tab, active tab, on the right of the tab bar, no close buttons at all)
• Disable url trimming (removal of http://) and url formatting (greying out subdomains and directories).
• Removal of the go button and bookmark star.
• Display attributes on mouse over, including Alt, Title, Src, Href, Action, Onsubmit and others.
• Disable automatic image resizing
• Display broken image and to-be-loaded image placeholders
• Disable caching
• Disable search suggestions

The add-on furthermore adds several toolbar buttons to the Customize Toolbar menu. Firefox users can now place View Source and Online/Offline buttons in a toolbar in the browser if they select to do so.

Several of the features that the extension fixes can also be “fixed” directly by editing Firefox preferences. See Firefox: Add HTTP Back To Address Bar for instance for instructions on how to disable the web browser’s url trimming and url formatting.

FeatureFix for Firefox can aid users who do not want to work (or shy away from working) with the about:config dialog. Firefox users can download and install the add-on from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The second o-day security issue has received a critical severance rating as it can be used to crash the web browser and execute arbitrary code on the system.

Users running the latest stable version of the Opera web browser, which is 11.51 at the time of writing, should receive automatic updates right away.

It is alternatively possible to check for updates manually by clicking on Opera > Help > Check for Updates. The new version is also available for download at the official Opera website.

The new Opera version comes with stability enhancements as well. Opera 11.52 fixes a issue on YouTube where adjusting the volume on playing HTML5 videos could freeze the web browser. It furthermore fixes a issue where BitTorrent downloads would lead to a crash of the web browser.

It is likely that Opera 11.52 is the last 11.xx version of the browser. The development team has recently released Opera 12 alpha which showed improvements all over the board. The new version introduces new technology support. This includes support for WebGL and full hardware acceleration.

Tech enthusiasts interested in this development version of the browser can download it directly from the Opera desktop team blog.

Google recently released a first party extension for the Chrome browser with the purpose of providing Chrome users with tips to use the web browser more efficiently.

The extension will display tips when it recognizes ineffective behavior, for instance if a user uses only windows and no tabs to browser multiple websites.

The core question here is obviously if those users would be able to find and install the Chrome Tips extension, and the answer is probably no.

Regardless of that oversight in design, it can be handy if you do not mind running the extension in the background while working in the browser.

The extension will display tips in a small toolbar on top. The core issue that I have with the extension is that the tips are time and action based, which means that you may never see a tip coming up if you are an advanced user.

I tested the extension for a long time and did not see a single tip come up, hence the lack of a screenshot.

If you open the constants.js file of the extension you will see all tips listed in the interface. Here are a few examples of the tips listed:

• Key for tip when user needs to be educated about switching between tabs.
• Key for tip when the user needs to be educated about pinned tab feature.
• Key for tip when user needs to be educated about browsing in private.
• Key for tip when the user needs to be educated about search from omnibox.

The extension in its current state offers 13 different tips. That’s not a lot and explains why some users may never see tips displayed in the browser. I personally would have preferred a link somewhere in the browser user interface to a static page that lists all the tips.

The idea is interesting especially since the extension can display tips whenever it recognizes ineffective user behavior. Still, a lot more tips and the option to display them directly would be handy.

Chrome users can install Chrome Tips from the official Chrome Web Store.

I also noticed a new design of the extensions listing in Chrome Dev. Not sure for how long it has been there but it looks clean and really nice.

Most users who have that I know do the following when they want to open a link or a website that is displayed in one browser in another: They click in the address bar field of the browser and mark all of the address. Advanced users may use the shortcut Ctrl-a after clicking for the same effect. They then right-click and select Copy (or press Ctrl-c) to copy the website address to the clipboard. Then they open a new tab in the second web browser and paste the url into the address field there. In the final step they click the load button or press enter.

That’s a lot of work for a very simple operation. If you have enough screen estate you may be able to run both Internet browsers on the screen at the same time. If you do, you can use simple drag and drop operations to open a link or open website in one web browser in another.

This works with all browsers that I have tested. You can drag and drop from and to Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer.

To drag you move the mouse over the favicon of the website or the link in question, click and hold the left-mouse button and drag the address into the other web browser. You can drop it anywhere there and the website will be loaded in the active or the selected tab.

It is such a simple thing that can make such a big difference in day to day work. Did you know about this method? Or do you know of other (browser) related tips that optimized your workflow significantly?

I ran Opera 12 Alpha through a series of tests and boy did the new version manage to impress. Opera 12 Alpha scored 336 points and 9 bonus points in the HTML5 test, that’s more than Firefox’s 314+9 and a lot more than Microsoft Internet Explorer 9′s 141+5. Only Google Chrome Dev managed to beat Opera by 8 standard points and 6 bonus points.

Opera still trails behind in the Peacekeeper benchmark when compared to the most recent Chrome Dev version, at least on a fairly standard Intel Core i7 system running Windows 7 Professional (Ghacks reader Matthew mailed me on the other hand stating that Opera beat Chromes run by nearly a factor of 2. Then again, he failed to mention the Chrome version tested).

This version of Opera has full hardware acceleration support. The browser is set to auto detect hardware acceleration capabilities of the graphics card. Opera notes that support works best if graphics card drivers are the most recent and that users may experience bugs in the alpha release.

Users who want to disable – or force – full hardware acceleration support in the browser need to open opera:config in the browser and filter for EnableHardwareAcceleration to disable (0), auto-detect (1) or force (2) hardware acceleration in the browser. Similar settings are available for the WebGL. Users need to filter for EnableWebGL to turn it off (0), auto-detect (1) or force on (2) the technology.

You can check if hardware acceleration is enabled in your version of Opera by loading the opera:gpu page in the web browser. If you see Vega backend: Software it is not enabled. Hardware acceleration uses a OpenGL backend currently. Opera has announced that support for DirectX will be implemented at a later time in the browser.

The developers have added new personalization features to the browser. Skins have been renamed as themes, and you can download and install a few on the official Opera themes page.

Interested users can download Opera 12 Alpha for all supported operating systems from the Opera Desktop Team blog.

News about the next Opera browser version and Opera Software in general have almost come to an halt in that time. Users interested in the browser may have picked up some news over at the Desktop team blog which is more or less the official place to go for Opera development information.

Opera 11.51 has been out for some time and the next version of Opera that the developers are currently working on will be Opera 12.00, codenamed Wahoo. Here is a screenshot of the latest snapshot of the upcoming web browser.

One of the first things that users will notice is the new skin that Opera is currently working on. The Featherweight skin modernizes the browser interface in several aspects including updated and polished icons, blending of panels and better colorization.

The real changes however are under the hood. Opera 12 ships with an updated core rendering engine and the HTMl5 parsing algorithm Ragnarök (which is more or less the Norse mythology version of the Apocalypse with the difference that the world will be reborn after this).

The developers have furthermore added full EXMAScript (JavaScript) 5.1 support. You will notice that the current Opera 12 snapshot fails some of the tests of the test run at the ECMAscript homepage. All other web browsers tested, including Firefox 9, Chrome 16 and Internet Explorer 9 fail tests as well.

If you look at all the changelogs posted you will notice that the developers are working hard on fixing bugs and other issues in the browser. It is not clear when Opera decides to release the next version of Opera to the public. The development team usually posts a few release candidate builds before they release the final version.

With the planned design, rendering speed and compatibility changes Opera 12 will seamlessly follow in the footsteps of previous Opera releases. You can download the latest snapshot release over at the Opera desktop team blog.

That’s usually the end of the story. Once you switch the default browser you are all set up to work with that Internet browser on the system. There may be situations on the other hand where you need to switch the default browser multiple times.

This can be in a development environment where you have installed multiple browsers. To make the testing easier, you switch default browsers. But it can also have technical reasons. Say you do not get the prompt to make your favorite browser the default browser on the system. While you could edit the Windows Registry manually for this or try to uninstall and re-install your favorite browser, you might also use a program like Change Default Browser for the job.

The program supports the four web browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Opera. It detects the installed browsers automatically and displays them in the interface. You can use the browse button to select a different browser, for instance if you have multiple versions of a browser installed on the system. You can even select other programs or executable in case you want to make a different browse the default on the system.

To make a browser the default, simply select it in the program interface and click on the Set Default Browser to make it the default system browser.

If there is something to complain about it is the need to install the application before you can change the default browser on the system. Other than that it is a solid program with no downsides.

You can download the program that is compatible with all recent 32-bit and 64-bit editions of Windows from the official program homepage. Please note that you need to run the program with elevated rights as it needs to make modifications to the Windows system registry.

When you open the new homepage you will see lots of featured add-ons and stuff on that page similar to how Google is promoting extensions on the Google Chrome web store. One thing that I dislike is the fact that version compatibilities are hidden on the add-on pages.

Not everything has turned to the worse though which can be mainly attributed to the new up and coming extensions category that has not been there before. Unlike Most Popular, which is an overall indicator for an add-on’s popularity since its release on the Mozilla website, up and coming looks solely at the most popular new add-ons.

The easiest way to display add-ons of that category is to open this link in your web browser.

You won’t find information about the sorting or rating of add-ons on the up and coming page. I’d assume that it calculates that from user comments, ratings and downloads, but I could be wrong. Regardless of that, it is fair to say that you find mostly new add-ons there that have been uploaded to the repository less than 60 days ago.

There is no guarantee that you find the next big add-on hit there first, but chance is high that you won’t miss out on popular add-ons anymore if you visit that site regularly.

Even better, you can subscribe to the listing to receive updates in the feed reader of choice. Please note that the feed is updated whenever a new extension makes it into the up and coming listing, handy if you ask me. Subscriptions are actually available for all different add-on sorting options.

I personally like the idea of the up and coming category, as much as I like to parse the updated category.

Are you using the add-on repository over at Mozilla? If so, what’s your favorite category and feature?

You may remember that both Firefox 5 and 6 did not ship with big new features or improvements. Well, this changes with the release of Firefox 7. When you look at the new features you will notice one sticking out: Mozilla managed to improve memory usage of the Firefox web browser drastically (that’s the organization’s word). What does it mean in detail? A blog post by Nicholas Nethercoate over at Mozilla has the answers:

Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. In particular, Firefox 7′s memory usage will stay steady if you leave it running overnight, and it will free up more memory when you close many tabs.

Up to 50% less memory usage is a big number. Probably even more important than that is that the browser won’t feel like eating up all the RAM over time anymore, which is definitely a good thing, considering that the browser has a reputation for being memory inefficient.

The changelog lists addition features, including a new rendering backend that speeds up Canvas operations on Windows, support for text-overflow: ellipsis and the Web Timing specification and faster bookmark and password changes syncing when using Firefox Sync.

Firefox 7 is currently not available on the official homepage. It is likely that the developers are still preparing for the new release. Some mirror servers are already listing Firefox 7 for all supported operating systems and languages, while others do not. Expect a release announcement in the next 24 hours.

Firefox stable users will receive update notifications shortly in the browser to update automatically to the new version.

Beta, Aurora and Nightly users will also be pushed to a new version in the coming days. Check out Future Firefox Features, What I’m Looking Forward To for some pointers as to what you can expect in those versions.

The first step is to download the Portable Google Chrome installer from this link:

http://stadt-bremerhaven.de/download-manager.php?id=250

After the download is complete, which may take a few minutes, run the installer. The installer is a 7zip extractor. To get Portable Google Chrome set up on a flash drive, click the “…” button and choose the flash drive. Click Extract.

The “…” button is a browse button. You would click on Computer and then the appropriate drive.

The extraction does not take as long as the download. Portable Chrome is being extracted to your flash drive. When the extraction is complete, you may use the portable version of Chrome right away. Browse your flash drive and double-click its icon.

You will see the application immediately. Double-click the “Portable Google Chrome” icon to open the folder with the program files. Double-click the ChromeLoader icon, which is the application.

You will notice that the language is set to German by default. If you speak and read German, that is fantastic. On the other hand, you may not. Click the wrench button in the upper right corner of the screen and select Options. In this demonstration, only a few of the words are in German and everything else is in English. Usually, it is all in German. Select “Under the Hood” and under the Web Content section, click the “Languages and spell-checker settings” box.

You will see the language list and it may already have English (United States) as the default, but some content is still going to come up in German, so click Add at the bottom left of the screen and select the appropriate language.

Click OK. You may be prompted to restart for changes to take effect. Close all browsers, save all files and Restart. When you begin again, your portable Chrome will be in the language you selected. In this case, it is English.

Using Portable Google Chrome

This portable version works exactly the same way as the standard version. The same processes apply, except that you can now run it from any computer. Your favorite sites and web applications are progressively saved on the flash drive as you add them. Your browsing history is saved to the flash drive as well. The browser itself looks and functions normally.

The overall speed is generally slower than the PC non-portable version. This speed varies depending on the speed of the flash drive and its capacity. Use at least a 2GB flash drive. 4GB would be even better and anything higher would be overkill. This will run on Windows 7 and on Windows XP, so there is some versatility along with portability. Enjoy portable Chrome!

Mozilla developer Brian Hackett worked on a new feature called type inference for over a year. You may know that you need to define types for variables in some programming languages, while it is not necessary to do that in others. JavaScript for instance does not require type definitions for variables. The downside here is that this practice can have an impact on performance.

Type inference now refers to an algorithm that is automatically deducting the type of an expression.

Type inference is boosting Firefox JavaScript performance big time. Mozilla’s David Mandelin noticed JavaScript performance improvements of up to 44%.

On my machine, TI takes our Kraken score from about 4900 to about 3400, a 1.44x speedup. And on V8-v6, our score goes from about 5000 to about 6600, a 1.3x speedup.

Sebastian Anthony over at Extreme Tech did some measuring of his own and came to the conclusion that the performance gains depend largely on the benchmark used. He noticed performance improvements between 15% to 30% in benchmarks on a Intel i7 930 processor with 6 Gigabytes of RAM and a fairly speedy Nvidia GTX 460 video card.

With Firefox 9, and without type inference, the Kraken benchmark takes 3895 milliseconds; with type inference enabled it takes just 2763 milliseconds. Firefox 9, without type inference, scores 6075 on the V8 JavaScript Benchmark; with type inference, the score jumps up to 6585. Even on banal tests like Microsoft’s HTML5 Sudoku, type inference improves the solving time for 10,000 grids from 2.6 down to 1.62 seconds — and yes, the FishBowl framerate, at 2,000 fish, is increased by 15-20% with type inference enabled.

Interested users can download the latest Mozilla Central release with type inference enabled from the official Mozilla ftp server. The next Firefox channel to get type inference is Firefox Aurora, which is going to be released on September 27. Firefox Beta will get the feature on November 8, and the stable channel on December 20.

What many users do not know is that Google is offering an alternative installer for Windows administrators who want to install the Chrome web browser for multiple user accounts.

The alternate Google Chrome installer for Windows is available here on this help page at the Google Chrome support website. A click on Alternate installer for all user accounts leads to the multi-user installer for Windows.

The installer is an offline installer, it comes with all program modules and does not need to download additional contents from the Internet during installation.

Google notes:

These alternate installers don’t require network connection to install Chrome, so you can install Chrome while being offline. Once installed, Chrome will attempt to automatically update whenever it detects that a newer version of the browser is available. However, your network configuration may prevent the browser from updating properly. It’s recommended that you bookmark this page and come back periodically to manually download newer versions of Chrome.

It should be obvious that administrator rights are required to run the Google Chrome multi-user installer under Windows. It also needs to be noted that running the installer will replace all other versions of Chrome that may be already installed on the computer.

Users of the system will be notified automatically that the browser has updated to a system-wide version during the next browser start. They may need to recreate profile information, especially so if they have used a more recent build of the browser before.

Administrators need to uninstall a version of Chrome that is already installed in the administrator account before they run the alternate Chrome installer.

Opera Software regardless of that is about to release an update for the latest stable version of the Internet browser. You may recall that Opera is currently working on two different versions of the browser: First on Opera 12 the next big release and then on the maintenance release Opera 11.51 which all stable users can update to.

Opera 11.51 will be a maintenance release that improves the browser’s stability on all supported platforms. Opera’s plan is to release Opera 11.51 before the next big version Opera 12.00.

The developers right now have released the release candidate of Opera 11.51 on the official Opera Desktop Team blog. This indicates that a release of the final version of Opera 11.51 is imminent.

The change log lists several crash fixes, for instance a crash on Macs when opening Opera Dragonfly, or a crash on all systems when marking e-mail messages as “not spam”.

Opera users should not expect new features from the release, as it is only being pushed out to resolve issues that users have under Opera 11.50.

It needs to be noted that Opera 11.51 will upgrade Opera 11.50 on the system when installed. The release won’t touch a Opera Next version that is installed on the system.

Most users should probably wait for the final release before they update their web browser. That is, unless they work with Opera and experience one of the issues that version 11.51 fixes.

Opera 11.50 users can download Opera 11.51 Release Candidate from the Opera website.