ReadWriteWeb

The browser wars are back with a vengeance. In no small part thanks to the efforts of Google Chrome, we have seen a resurgence in browser inovation and a new emphasis on speed over the last year and a half. Today, Opera is launching its newest weapon against Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer. Billed as the "world's fastest browser," Opera 10.50 for Windows - which also sports a new user interface - might just be Opera's best browser to date. The question, though, is if this new release will be enough to help Opera gain new users and market share.

The growth of the Firefox web browser is one that's been spurred on by word-of-mouth referrals, volunteerism and community-funded advertising campaigns to raise awareness. Over the years, the alternative web browser slowly chipped away at dominant Internet Explorer's market share, despite its competitor's advantage of coming bundled with the Windows operating system. By January of last year, Firefox topped 20% market share and by December, it reached 22%. But now, that growth has stalled. Actually, it has declined a slight 0.18 percentage points over the past month. Meanwhile, IE declined by 0.60 points.

And what's to blame for these drops?

Opera just announced that it plans to bring its mobile browser, Opera Mini, to the iPhone. The Norwegian company will give the press and its partners a sneak peek of the application during next week's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Opera Mini on the iPhone will include all of Opera's default features like Speed Dial, tabs and a password manager. Opera Mini for the iPhone will also feature Opera's compression technology, which compresses text and images on Opera's servers before they get sent to the phone. The question, however, is whether Apple will allow the application into the App Store.

Just a few days after releasing Firefox for the Nokia N900 handset, Mozilla just announced that it is also making good progress on an Android version of Firefox. According to Firefox developer Vladimir Vukićević, development of Android for Firefox is progressing quickly. While there are no plans for the release of an official alpha version just yet, Vukićević has already managed to compile and install an early version of Firefox for Android.

Opera just released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. In this report, Opera focused on analyzing the behavior of users of Opera Mini, the company's mobile Web browser. Worldwide, Facebook is the leading social network among Opera Mini users, and the social network saw its traffic from Opera Mini users increase by 619%. Twitter's global growth rate was close to 2,900%. In the US, however, Opera Mini's users are not very interested in using Twitter. Traffic to Twitter from Opera Mini users declined 21% over the course of the last year.

It seems like everybody is scrambling to secure a piece of the mobile advertising market these days. Google is still sorting out the details of its AdMob acquisition, but barring any regulatory snafus, the acquisition should go through in the next few months. Apple acquired the relatively unknown mobile advertising network Quattro earlier this month. Today, Opera announced that it has acquired AdMarvel, a San Mateo-based mobile advertising company.

Opera just released the first pre-alpha version of Opera 10.5. While most users generally only think about Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome as the major players in the current browser wars, there can be no doubt that Opera is working hard to push browser development forward as well. This latest alpha version shows that Opera has worked hard to speed up the browser. Carakan, the new JavaScript engine in Opera 10.5, is up to seven times faster than Opera's current engine. The new version of Opera also adds a number of new features like an enhanced private browsing mode and a new graphics engine that can be hardware accelerated.

As part of the European Union's antitrust agreement with Microsoft, the company will be required next year to show a list of alternatives to Internet Explorer to any Windows user with IE installed as their default browser.

Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

Ever since the browser wars and the 1998 Microsoft antitrust trial (during which the software giant was convicted of monopolistic and illegal business practices for its bundling of Windows with Internet Explorer), consumers have been largely unaware of how they access the Internet. These magical portals are too often "chosen" by consumers through a manipulative dance during which the partner - generally a huge corporation with mind share and stock shares at stake - remains unseen.

"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.

Opera today announced that the latest version of its browser, Opera 10, was downloaded 10 million times during the first week after its release. On its first day of release, Opera registered around 2 million downloads, up from 580,000 when the company released Opera 9 in 2006. Opera 10 launched to generally positive reviews and the company is already working on the next iteration of Opera 10, which will include Opera Unite, a web server and a number of web services that users will host on their own desktops.

After numerous betas and two release candidates, Opera today released the final version of Opera 10, the company's flagship desktop Internet browser. Users who skipped all the pre-release versions of Opera 10 will be pleasantly surprised with the updates that Opera has brought to its browser. These include Opera Turbo, the company's compression technology that makes surfing on slower connections more bearable, visual tabs, a smarter spell checker, and a faster rendering engine. Opera also still features a built-in email client and RSS reader.

Many of us have brought our laptops to events only to meet the cruel irony that crowded wireless hot spots mean tech event attendees go without internet access. Today Opera announced the third beta release of the Opera 10 browser including a number of interesting UI improvements and special emphasis on Opera Turbo. Rumored to improve browsing speeds over limited bandwidth connections, Turbo is a compression technology that the company describes as "curing the bandwidth blues."

If you ever dreamed of writing your own opera, your time has finally come. Thanks to @youropera, you can now submit your tweets for inclusion in the first Twitter Opera, which will be performed at the Royal Opera House in London. The experiment started a few days ago and the final product will be performed during the Deloitte Ignite 09 festival in early September.

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 its effort to detangle itself from the ongoing proceedings of the European Union antitrust case, it seems Microsoft is offering to include rival web browsers in the Windows OS. Revealed in a statement by the European Commission, Microsoft offered to give consumers a choice of browser installation through a browser ballot screen. New computer owners running Windows may get a chance to choose their browsers form a variety of software makers.

In a recent interview with Network World, Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, defends the company's upcoming web browser (Opera 10)'s  "Unite" feature - the new technology that turns your browser into a web server. He said that Unite's decentralized nature makes it more difficult for hackers to break into computer systems - not easier.

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.

Opera has been buzzing up our inboxes lately with rather vague press releases on how it planned to "reinvent the web."

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."

Opera the Browser may not be a household name in the United States, but around the world it's wildly popular and on the company's 15th birthday things are moving in directions the founders may never have expected.

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.

Apple today released the first public beta of Safari 4, which sports a redesigned interface that resembles Google's Chrome, as well as support for all of the major Internet standards, and a large range of new and enhanced features. Among these new features are a reimagined start page with a speed-dial interface similar to what Opera and Chrome are currently offering, a Cover Flow-like interface for browsing your bookmarks and history, and the ability to perform a full-text history search of your bookmarks.

Only last week, the Mozilla Project proudly announced a "milestone release" of Fennec, the web browser also known as "Firefox Mobile." The much anticipated software was made available for download in a pre-alpha version for the HTC Touch Pro, a Windows Mobile smartphone. Shortly after its debut, mobile web enthusiasts everywhere began testing the new browser. But then something strange occurred. Instead of surfing the web, testers were stuck staring at a black-and-white checkerboard screen. It appeared that Fennec, right out of the gate, was completely broken.

Opera plans to unveil a new version of its SDK today that will allow Opera's partners to create a more uniform browsing experience across multiple devices and platforms. The new version of the Opera Devices SDK now gives developers access to Opera Link, the company's bookmark synchronization service. Once device manufacturers start integrating this, users will be able to easily access their Opera bookmarks from their mobile phone, desktop, or Wii.