by Playfuls Staff |
30th July 2006
Tough days are coming for Internet Explorer 7: both Mozilla Firefox and Opera have announced upgrades to their actual version. And they both have a lot of improvements.[more]
First there was the Mozilla community, which announced a long expected version 2.0 of Firefox.
Among the early reviews and critics, two important new capabilities of Firefix 2.0 Beta were unanimously acclaimed: an integrated spell checker, and an anti-phishing tool. The spell-checker should help bloggers and forum members happy, since grammar and writing mistakes are going to be eliminated. As soon as you start to type into a textbox it will start spell checking. If it finds that you have made a mistake it will notify you by placing a red-squiggly line underneath the word.
Firefox 2.0 Beta follows the anti-phishing trend today (which IE 7.0 Beta inaugurated) and warns you about potentially dangerous sites, stored on local lists, or on Google’s site listing.
The interface is quite the same to the one we see in Firefox 1.5. Firefox 2.0 does include a horizontal scrolling capability for tabs, and an ability to close a tab directly from within the tab itself. The Options dialog has been reworked to include a horizontal, tabbed based interface, and numerous changes have been made under the hood.
As for Opera, the company that produces it is hoping to find even more customers than today, with a lot of new features added to version 10. The main target is not Mozilla Firefox, but IE7, which now dominates the browsing area, but is in a sharp decline since version 6.
"Opera 9 is the first salvo towards IE 7. We're trying to give a user-friendly experience and eliminate problems," said Thomas Ford, public relations manager for desktop Opera software.
Opera has managed to attract its users with some cool widgets and a cross platform compatibility which made it available even on Nintendo’s popular Dual Screen console, not to mention the other mobile devices used for browsing like phones or PDAs.
This cross-platform compatibility is seen as a way of getting market share from where IE is not present or has a weak presence.
"We want to enable Opera 10 to work on any device--mobile, desktop, games consoles. We want to find ways to tie things in much better," Ford said. "That's something we do that Microsoft fundamentally can't."
The widgets play an important part in the strategy Opera will use in the future. Their success since version 9 made the company expand their role in browsing, making them more visible outside the simple Net-surfing activity, for either an improvement in the navigation or just for entertainment.
Opera also dreams of an era when people will browse the Internet without the well-known desktop and will use “unusual” devices like small gaming consoles (PSP or DS) or even MP3 players.
Since its success depends on how much freedom the browser allows to its users, Opera declared it’s open for developers to create new applications to be integrated or optimize those already present in it.
"We will be unleashing developer tools, which are still in the planning stages," Ford said. "We want developers to use Opera as a Web development platform, using open standards. We need to keep the Web ready for open standards."
Opera 9 has already seen a significant uptake of users, with 700,000 downloads on the first day of release. Overall, Opera 9, including the mobile Mini version, has seen roughly 25 million downloads since its release in June, the company said.
