"Some folks at Google," as the project team is quaintly described on Google's new What Browser site, were charged with explaining what a browser is and what choices consumers have. They got halfway there; but as far as helping consumers make informed choices, information is still limited to pretty colors and shiny logos.

The cornerstone of the site is this average user-friendly animated video explaining in painfully simple terms what a web browser does. It's not an OS, and it's not a search engine. It was simple enough that my 8-year-old niece didn't have too much of a problem with the post-video comprehension check I gave her.

The site gives equally simple text tutorials on how to change a homepage, a default search engine, and a default browser. Credit must go to the "folks" at Google for making these parts of the site accessible to the average Internet user, something that is difficult for a justifiably biased technology company to do.

Talk Nerdy to Me

The "Under the Hood" section of the site seemed like it might give the geekier among us some food for thought with regard to browser performance. It contained this history lesson of a browser timeline from Wikipedia and a series of diagnostic tests, mostly related to browsers' processing of JavaScript.

We ran the Google-developed V8 Benchmark Suite on four major browsers. It broke Internet Explorer, and returned seemingly arbitrary results of 164, 673, and 1794 for Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, respectively, on a scale of "bigger is better." We ran the WebKit SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on all four browsers, as well. You can click through to see our results for Chrome, IE, Safari, and Firefox.

Google's Still Got Some 'Splainin' To Do

We also opened the site with Epiphany, and WhatBrowser said it was Firefox 3. When we tried it out on Konqueror, well...

What browser? indeed. We're still waiting to see what result the Google site will return.

Which brings us to our final and most serious criticism. The site features the logos of the five major web browsers: Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Opera. No mention is made of the many other available options nor of their current existence.

The reason we feel these browsers should have been in some way included in Google's browser icebreaker is the same reason we feel there should have been at least some discussion of each browser's corporate affiliations, best uses, and technical capabilities: Out of fairness to the aforementioned casual Internet user who, after looking at this page, might know what his browser is but still won't have a clear idea of whether or why he should consider using other browsers.

I'm primarily a Chrome user, and I love the lightweight interface and speed. But it's not the most reliable for enterprise web-based software such as WebEx and certain other web applications. When I'm testing web apps for work, I very often have to break out one of my standby browsers.

The flip side of that coin is that, since IE is still a dominant figure in the territory, most apps and sites will still perform well enough in Internet Explorer. I can think of just one app I've tested this year that didn't have any IE support.

Some users will care whether or not their browser is open-sourced, or whether or not it's standards-compliant. Some will care much more that it's reliable for using enterprise web-based software. But the glaring absence of this information from Google's presentation shows us that, in the effort to avoid obvious accusations of favoritism, they've neglected a great opportunity to create an informed consumer culture around web browsers.

By presenting just the logos of five browsers, Google has done something to make consumers slightly more aware of their options but nothing to break down the rhetoric- and sentiment-driven attitudes of average users toward technology products.

So, let's have a little conversation about that now: What's your browser of choice, and why? When did you start thinking critically about your browser? What performance or other issues trouble you most? Let us know in the comments.

Looking at StatCounter's browser data, it doesn't look like this release had real any influence on Opera's global market share yet, but in Europe, Opera went from around 6.5% on September 1st to 7.5% today, and in the US, Opera went from 0.65% to 8%. In September 2008, Opera was hovering around 0.5% in the US, so the company has definitely seen some nice growth over the last year, even though in September 2008, it was also immediately overtaken by the newly released first beta of Google Chrome.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Browser Market Share

After testing Opera 10 for a while, it quickly becomes clear that it is a perfectly capable browser. It's got everything the majority of users would ever want, ranging from the 'speed dial' homepage to a sidebar for taking notes, which are synced between different machines, just like your bookmarks. There is a 'magic wand' that automatically fills in passwords from Opera 10's built-in password manager, mouse-gestures, real-time fraud protection, a BitTorrent client,  and the tabs now optionally show a rendered version of the page for a more visual experience. The 'visual tabs' can also be put into a sidebar, a nice feature in the age where vertical space is limited as users have moved to wide-screen displays.

Opera 10 is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris.

Speed

In our informal tests, Opera 10 couldn't match Firefox, Safari 4, and Chrome in most benchmarks. On a MacBook, Safari finished the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 711ms while Opera needed over 5700ms. In daily use, however, these benchmarks tend to mean very little and we barely noticed any difference.

Even though Opera has always been a good browser with a very passionate user base, it never quite caught on with mainstream users. Opera 10 is definitely Opera's best browser to date, but chances are that even this new version won't help Opera to gain a lot of market share as other browsers now have the momentum. However, if you haven't looked at Opera for a while, now is a good time to give it a try again. And if you often find yourself in a situation where you have to deal with a sluggish Internet connection (airports, hotels, etc.), Opera Turbo alone makes this a handy browser to have around, even if you don't make it your default browser.

Additional Opera 10 features include web mail and web feed reader integration and an inline spell-checker for blogs, Twitter and Facebook posts. To find out more info on Opera 10 beta 3 or to install it, visit opera.com/browser/next.

As of today, the project has arrived at the end of the first scene. While the plot so far is pleasantly bizarre, we're not quite sure yet if this will be a total train wreck or a masterpiece of collaborative writing.

In brief, at the end of Act One, Scene One, William is languishing in a tower, having been kidnapped by a group of birds who are anxious for revenge after he has killed one of their number. Hans has promised to rescue him. The Woman With No Name is off to her biochemistry laboratory to make a potion to let people speak to the birds.

As was to be expected, not every Opera fan is excited about this project, but the Royal Opera clearly hopes to attract some attention with this project (though the number of submissions to @youropera only started to pick up today).

So far, Twitter definitely doesn't look like it's the right tool for writing an opera, but maybe the final result will surprise us all. If you want to participate, just tag your submissions with the #youropera hashtag.

According to Stat Counter, Internet Explorer currently holds the majority market share for browsers at 61%. The next competitor is Firefox with roughly 30% of installs and Opera, Safari and Chrome make up the difference. While non-IE users have had to install their browser of choice, Internet Explorer's rise to success can be attributed to having been bundled on every Windows PC. With the new multi-browser bundling, competitors will finally reap the rewards of Microsoft's distribution channels. As new PC's are purchased, it's likely that Firefox and Chrome will see a new opportunity to thrive.

Less than tech-savvy users who've never questioned IE bundling with Windows may purchase new machines and choose their browser for reasons that have nothing to do with performance or popularity. A user may simply choose to run Opera because they're a music lover or Chrome because they're a car enthusiast. While it's too early to tell how consumer habits will change, if the EU chooses to settle with Microsoft, browser developers will see a major shift in the market place.

That claim is probably meant to fight back against some people's initial concerns that hosting files on their own PC will leave them open to attack. However, simply addressing security issues is somewhat missing the point about the real trouble with Unite: it's not solving a problem we actually have.

According to the interview, Tetzchner addresses the concerns of those in the security community who fear this technology that aims to put a web server on every PC. He says, "when you're hacking a single system, if you have everything that belongs to everyone in one location, you only need to break in once. If you have it in different computers it's a little more complicated. If you get into one Web server and everyone's data is in there, that's easier than getting into a million computers."

While Opera and the tech community continue to debate the technology's security or lack thereof, the rest of the tech early adopters have simply moved on. Outside of the Opera fanatics (we know who you are!), most of us either skimmed the news briefly or, at the most, may have downloaded the alpha and played with it for a bit. But did the lot of us switch browsers and start sharing files? No.

Why is that? Shouldn't this be just the sort of thing that has techies all a'twitter? What's going on?

Where's the Geek Love?

When Opera revealed the mysterious (and perhaps overly-hyped) Unite, they probably didn't get the response they expected. After numerous emails and teases about a new technology that was going to "reinvent the web," for the most part, the community response was "huh?"

Oh sure, Opera fanboys and girls got it right away as did web developers and other geekier-than-thou folks, but even within the tech community itself, there was confusion...and a bit of "bah humbug" too.

We remember reading through various blog comments where users dismissed Unite as nothing more special than a browser with P2P plugins - a statement that's only true to a point. While the technology enables P2P between browsers, it does so via a proxy server in the middle at operaunite.com. That middle service could easily be a single point of failure for the Unite infrastructure. Opera Unite's proxy goes down, you go down. Sure, that might not be any different than the cloud services we rely on now: Gmail, Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, etc. However, even if one of those was to crash-and-burn, it wouldn't take our whole web of services down with it.

But Unite wants to replace just about every cloud app you use today with its own apps for file sharing, social note-posting, chat, photo sharing, and media playing...and that's not to mention how Unite wants to let you host your own web server, too. In other words, Opera wants to (partially) move the cloud back off the the web to your PC.

They even go so far as to claim that their single point of failure is an improvement on what we do today: "We place our trust in these third parties, and we hope for the best, but as long as our own computers are not first class citizens on the Web, we are merely tenants, and hosting companies are the landlords of the Internet," writes product analyst Lawrence Eng.

Thanks, but we'll take our numerous cloud apps over the Unite+PC combo any day.

What Problem Does Unite Solve?

When we started moving from desktop to web, initially testing the waters with email services, later moving to photo and video sharing services, and finally to social networking sites like Facebook that let us communicate and share media, the solutions being implemented were solving real challenges. Setting up desktop email was hard for non-techies (what's my email server's address? what's SMTP?). There were mailbox storage limits and attachment size limits. Letting grandma and grandpa see our digital photos wasn't easy. Getting in touch and staying in touch with our wide network of friends was downright impossible. But then these web applications came along and made it possible for everyone to use technology. They were simple, straightforward, and fun. And soon a Web revolution was underway. A real one, that is.

What problem does Opera Unite solve that could kick off the next revolution of the web? Are we having trouble with cloud services? Are we concerned that they're so insecure that moving everything via P2P through Opera is somehow better? Is Unite easier than Facebook? Than flickr? Heck, than email? No.

It's not easier for us techies by any means (especially since its tied to one browser) and it's not even close to being easy for the "regular folks" of the online world...you know, the ones who don't even know what a browser is

So security concerns aside, what is Unite doing for us that we can't get elsewhere? Anyone?

If you think we're missing the point, chime in below.

Well, we've just received concrete confirmation of exactly what that means. Their new product, Opera Unite, "turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers."

Unite is now available in the Opera 10 desktop browser from Opera Labs, and services run directly in the browser. Directions for setup are also available at that page.

Opera Product Analyst, Launrence Eng, writes, "Opera Unite is a unique technology that turns any computer or device running Opera into a Web server. In other words, your computer (running Opera Unite) is truly part of the fabric of the Web, rather than just interacting with it."

The first apps offered by Opera Unite include file sharing, a web server, a social note-posting app, a chat app, photo sharing, and a media player, but Eng states that much grander features and functions are in the works.

"Think of multiplayer games, from simple two-player challenges like Chess up to sprawling RPGs. And Opera Unite is not just about fun. Think about collaborative applications such as spreadsheets, documents or Wikis, which you can work on with friends and colleagues without having to host them on a third-party site such as Google Spreadsheets or installing specialized applications on a dedicated server. You could use reverse Ajax or "COMET" techniques to mean that all the updates are seen on everyone's computers in real time; multiple people could make changes at once, without having to lock people out."

Here are some screenshots of the apps in action; click to see larger versions:

Last and kind of least, here's a rather touchy-feely video from Opera explaining in very simple terms what Unite is supposed to do to web architecture:

The company marked its big day with an awesome throw-back version of its home page and a press release reminding everyone just how far it's come.

From the original "speed dial" to built-in Torrent support, Opera has been as innovative as it has been standards-based. Håkon Wium Lie, now the CTO of the company, was one of the key inventors of CSS.

The big win for the company has, of course, been in mobile browsing. Before Safari and the iPhone, Opera Mobile was without a doubt the best mobile browser on the market. The iPhone is only a portion of the mobile market and Opera remains strong on many other phones, including default status as the browser on several Windows Mobile phones. Now, Opera has come to the Nintendo Wii, automobiles (it just got added to Ford Trucks for example), and countless other devices. For the first time in its history, the now 700 person company is planning a major advertising push - so, if you haven't thought much about Opera before, you may be hearing a lot more about it soon.

Opera is cool. We don't use it here at ReadWriteWeb because we love our Firefox plug-ins, but we sure are happy to see the company thriving and innovating 15 years after its birth.

Granted, most of the new features in Safari 4 are not exactly new, but, as Apple does so often, it exceeds at putting all of these features together in a very attractive package.

New Features

Just like Chrome, Safari 4 has moved its tabs all the way to the top of the browser window. Apple, however, did not copy Google's unified search and address bar but stuck with the more traditional separation of the two.

Cover Flow

The new Cover Flow interface for bookmarks and your browser history is partly just eye-candy, but it also does work surprisingly well and can come in handy when you just remember the layout of a page, but not the exact name. The interface displays a screenshot of the bookmarked pages. Secure pages are blacked out.

Top Sites

The speed-dial startup page, named 'Top Sites' by Apple, is quite similar to what we have seen from Google and Opera. The page is generated automatically, based on the sites you visit most often, but Safari 4 also allows you to rearrange items on the page and pin certain sites to the page, so that they won't disappear even if you don't visit them as frequently. You can set Top Sites to display 6, 12, or 24 pages. Top Sites will also notify you when a page has been updated.

Full History Search

Safari now also features a 'full history search,' which not only remembers the page titles and URLs you went to, but also indexes the text from every page you visit. It should be noted that Opera also offers full history search.

Performance

In our informal tests, running the Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks, Safari beat out Firefox 3.0.6 by a wide margin (800ms vs. 2280ms), though the latest developer version of Chrome came out on top (617ms). While using the browser, however, it didn't feel like there was a significant difference between Chrome and Safari 4. Emails in Gmail opened almost instantly, and even complex pages rendered very quickly.

Safari on Windows

On Windows machines, Safari finally feels like a native application that mostly blends into the environment - though the plain gray background still makes it stand out a bit.

Developer Tools

Safari 4 now includes a wide range of developer tools. Among those are a new resources pane, a tools for managing databases, and a JavaScript debugger and profiler.

Verdict

Safari 4 is a significant update to Apple's browser. In terms of features and usability, it might actually now be ahead of most of its competition, and Safari's performance is on par or better than its competition as well. Where it lacks, however, is in its support for third-party plugins (though the existing plugins do tend to be of a rather high quality). For mainstream users, this is often not an issue, and these users will be more than happy with Safari. As you would expect from Apple, Safari's user interface is extremely well thought out, and features like Top Sites or the full history search make it a browser that is both functional and fun to use.

In PCMag tests, the Fennec browser was installed on two devices. On each one, the browser had to be launched twice in order for it to run. But upon start up, only the checkerboard pattern displayed, not the expected introductory screen with instructions. By scrolling up and left, you could reach the address bar, but entering in URLs only returned errors. By kick-starting the phone's modem by first launching Opera, it was possible to get the title bar of various web pages to appear - but still no page would display. Other Fennec testers experienced the same issues.

Wrote PCMag.com's columnist Sascha Segan, "If this is a milestone, it's marking a pit stop. Better luck next time, Mozilla folks."

What Happened?

According to Mozilla Mobile team member, Mark Finkle, the problem appears to be memory-related. He notes that Windows Mobile devices have some restrictions around memory use and that's what his team is now trying to work around. However, it sounds like the team still hasn't yet nailed down the exact problem which is causing the bug. On his blog, he writes "when we figure out the true cause...we'll be sure to blog the details." (When?)

Checking in on the bug's status, it's still listed as "Assigned to: Nobody." But we're taking that to mean (we hope) that the entire Fennec team is working on addressing this showstopper of an issue.

Says one commenter on Bugzilla, the problem happens immediately following an allocation failure in gfxImageSurface, but no one else has chimed in to confirm his statement yet.

The Mobile Web: the Next Browser Battleground

Interestingly enough, while Mozilla's attempt at the mobile web was crashing and burning, another mobile browser, Skyfire, was releasing a landmark version of their browser, too. Skyfire version 0.9 for Windows Mobile and Symbian, a browser which already supports Flash 10, Silverlight, and Ajax, introduced a new "social" version of their software on February 12th.

In the latest update, Skyfire offers a Friendfeed-like start portal which delivers news from RSS sources as well as updates from Facebook and Twitter. It's pre-configured with feeds from Digg, ESPN, Google News, Hulu, YouTube and Yahoo! News, but those can be easily customized.

In addition to relative newcomer Skyfire, some of the most popular browsers for the mobile web comes from Opera, whose mobile software is currently installed on millions of devices worldwide. 

Although Skyfire and Opera may not have the brand-name recognition that Mozilla enjoys (well, perhaps Opera does), it's clear that when it comes to mobile web browsers, innovation can happen anywhere, from any company. What dominates on the desktop will not necessarily be what dominates on our mobiles, and for mobile web users, that could be a good thing.

This synchronization feature was already part of Opera's desktop browser, but version 9.7 of the SDK will also give developers the ability to integrate it into their own devices. According to Opera's CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, Opera wants to give operators the ability to create a unified experience across their triple-play offerings and on phones, computers, TVs (or entertainment devices like the Wii).

Opera Zoon

The new version of the SDK also includes Opera's new hardware-accelerated zooming capability for devices with small screens. While not as elegant or intuitive as Apple's multi-touch gestures, Opera Zoom, which saw its debut on the Nintendo Wii, does work quite well.

Syncing Bookmarks as Competitive Advantage

Opera already syncs its bookmarks with the online version of Opera Link, but it would be great if Opera also allowed you to sync with other online bookmarking services like Yahoo's delicious. Other devices like the iPhone also allow users to sync bookmarks between the desktop and mobile phones.

Now that web browsing is slowly becoming a standard activity on mobile devices, being able to keep bookmarks in sync is clearly starting to become more important. Opera is in a good position to leverage its experience in cross-platform development here, though Mozilla and other browser developers are also working on similar projects.

Net Applications thinks that that the U.S. election, the Thanksgiving holiday, the rising unemployment in the U.S., and the extra weekend in November led to an increase in residential browsing during that month, but the general trends clearly also continued during December.

Will IE8 Make a Difference?

It will be interesting to see if the upcoming release of IE8 will be enough to turn Microsoft's fortunes in the browser market around. While we like the beta version of IE8 as a general purpose browser, it still doesn't have the extensibility and speed of Firefox. Google is also working on an extension architecture for Chrome, which will allow developers to port their Firefox plugins over to Google's browser and give users even more alternatives to IE7 and IE8.

Opera has had to face stiff competition in the desktop browser market from Google's Chrome, and the company is clearly looking to gain back some ground by emphasizing the speed of the rendering engine over new features in this release.

In terms of its user interface, the changes between version 9.6 and this alpha of Opera 10 are minimal and mostly cosmetic.

As for new features, Opera finally supports inline spell-checking. This feature had been sorely missing from Opera until now. Opera 10 can now also auto-update without giving notification to the user, similar to Google's Chrome.

Opera 10 also still includes all the major new features of Opera 9, including Feed Preview, Opera Link for bookmark synchronization, and the updated version of Opera Mail.

Presto 2.2

The rendering engine easily scored 100 out of 100 on the Acid 3 test (and easily passed the Acid 2 test as well). We benchmarked this alpha version against Opera 9.62 using the Sunspider and Dromaeo benchmarks. In both cases, Opera 10 was clearly faster, but the performance gains were typically around 10-15% and nowhere near the 30% claimed by Opera (though in their defense, Opera's PR material talks about the faster 'browsing experience,' not about benchmarks). Presto also wasn't able to come close to our benchmarks for Chrome.

A Capable Browser

Overall, Opera 10, at least in its current state, looks like an evolutionary update to previous versions. This preview version, however, was mostly meant to showcase the new rendering engine, so chances are that Opera will roll out additional new features and changes to the user interface in upcoming alpha and beta releases.

We have always had a soft spot for Opera, but somehow, the browser never quite found the sweet spot between speed and functionality that Firefox (in large part due to its extensions) and Chrome have.

Opera 10 is a capable browser with a number of very interesting features. However, when compared to Google's Chrome, with its unified address and search bar, as well as its speedy rendering engine, Opera 10 still has a bit of ground to cover before it will be able to challenge Chrome and Firefox.

Last month, we saw more news of the yet-to-be-released Firefox Mobile broswer - code named "Fennec" - surface with the release of Windows Mobile screenshots. Not to be outdone, Opera - the current mobile browser leader - has unveiled a beta of Opera Mini 4.2 - and it's promising a faster browsing experience.

"Opera Mini 4.2 can use our newly established server park in the US. This means significantly faster page downloads for our users in the Americas and Asia-Pacific region. Users in the rest of the world will also experience faster page downloads since we've reduced the load on our other servers."

Just as intriguing are Opera Mini's numbers. Opera is claiming 20 million users on the browser, which is up nearly 3 million users from the number they were reporting a quarter ago. That's impressive growth by any standard.

Users interested in test-driving the new version can install Opera Mini 4.2 without overwriting the current version of Opera Mini on their handset. To download the beta preview, visit Opera Mini.