And try not to admire the mimics of Malena Ernman, the singer.

Opera just announced that, while they are not the larger player in the browser field, they cornered a nice piece of turf: 100 million users of Opera (about 50 millions on the Desktop, and a 50 million chunk on the mobile phone).

This impressive position in the mobile phone market is probably going to get a serious boost with the other announcement from Opera: Apple just approved the Opera free browser on iTunes for application on the iPhone. Up to now, the iPhone user had no other choice than Safari (from Apple), but it seems that the competition will now be open with Opera mini which is generally considered as the best mobile browser (at least on the Windows-based phones).

I started to test it as early as this morning on my own iPhone 3G-S and I can tell you: it feels great.

• Installation and configuration in a whizzzz (near instantaneous (including the synchronization of bookmarks and Speed Dial with my Opera on PC Win7)
• Overall feeling: Very fast browser, a little jumpy. Sometimes, it even feels more nervous than most iPhone applications, but the operating mode is still 100% consistent with the rest of the iPhone apps, so it feels right)
• Screen surface well used and very good rendition of all the web sites I could rush to.

Highly recommended up to now.

My preferred Internet browser, Opera, has now reached a new version v10.50. Not only is it still the same nice, friendly and powerful browser, but it packs interesting new features:

• Faster: I did not try the beta versions so I was surprised: It’s fast, very fast. I am not sure if it warrants the “fastest browser on Earth” title that their promoter want to give it, but it is not often that you feel such acceleration from a mere version upgrade.
• Win7-ready, perfectly integrated in Windows 7: Special menus for the integration into the icon bar, a specialized animated icon, optimized window, etc.
• Private, secured navigation windows upon request.
• The widgets can now be dropped onto the desktop.

Since Opera is compatible not only with Windows, but with Apple, Linux and most mobile phones, this is very good news about to spread around.

In the beginning was Google which installed its servers in China in 2006. The “do no evil” company accepted the conditions of the government of the PRC and included heavy filtering and censoring of its search results (looking for Tienanmen will produce wildly different results in and out of China). But in January 2009, Google discovered that some hackers obtained some detailed information out of its own servers at this was targeting both American companies and Chinese political opponents or partisans of free speech in China. Subsequently, Google announced its intention of both lifting the censorship and leaving China.

What is still very unclear:

• Is Google really serious about these two options?
• Is the main reason for its ire, the political chase or the technological spying? (the US government including Hilary Clinton pushed hard with Google)

What is clear:

• The breach of information seems limited (only email subject lines have been breached, not contents).
• The hackers were affiliated to Chinese official bodies and did not only target Google.
• The hackers used some social engineering and security issues present in Internet Explorer and Adobe PDF, which were probably known but not closed by Microsoft and Adobe.

So, when such information appears in wide open channels of the world press, what happens? Most experts started commenting on the security loopholes in Internet Explorer 6 (and about Adobe PDF reader, too). Many people observed that Internet Explorer 6 is rather old and it is unfortunate that so many people still use it despite the known fact that it is a security liability when browsing the Internet. With such a rush, some very official people also asked for replacement of Internet Explorer (mainly v6) to be replaced with more modern browsers. Even representatives of the German, French and Australian governments asked their countries to replace Internet Explorer with something else.

The competition has seen this as a godsend since it created a rush for the other available browsers. For example (see the graph on the side), Firefox saw a brutal explosion of its downloads in Germany (nearly 300,000 Germans have downloaded Firefox in four days): about three times more than usual. It has been true in other countries even if it was not measured as precisely, and it has been observed by the other browsers Opera, Safari, Chrome (currently profiting from heavy advertising in some European countries like France).

This was definitely a good thing since it was bringing better browsers to many computers. It could have stayed there but there were several reaction and parallel events happening at the same time. The first one was that Firefox was preparing a major upgrade to the successful browser (in many parts of the world Firefox is now used by more Internet users than Internet Explorer). Named v3.6, this new version is bigger than what could have been expected from its small number increase (from 3.5 to 3.6 should have been a minor upgrade). This major event accelerated the rush, with people looking for features like:

• Built-in skins, to make it more personalized
• Faster, more stable
• More security conscious with the addition of user-level messages about risks, including reminders about what plug-ins are outdated and must be upgraded.
• Visual tab previews, which show you the tabs when you press Ctrl-Tab
• Aptitude to browse without leaving too many footsteps and traces in your PC (good for clean browsing like when you visit Adult sites)

This version is also appreciated by developers who will find a bunch of little improvements (like CSS gradients).

This is not only a great story to read. This is a great browser and you should consider downloading Firefox 3.6 now!

If you are not completely convinced, you should also consider downloading the newest Opera browser. Opera v10.10 has been available for a few months now and it also offering these advantages, plus some neat features like:

• Opera Unite: to easily share information between Opera users and browsers, without using a web site or a share folder on some social network.
• Opera Turbo: to adapt Opera to very slow Internet connections.
• Speed dial: to get a faster access to some web sites you choose (bookmarks on steroids).
• Mouse moves for faster commands.
• Opera link: to share bookmarks, speed dial configurations between several machines where you use Opera.

Opera is clearly my preferred browsing solution (even if I need to test my web sites on everything I can find, Opera is the central hub of my Internet browsing). Go and download Opera v10.10 now.

And, if you are not sure yet, I can also offer the small and fast browser from Google: Chrome. Since it all started around Google and China, it was worth mentioning, of course.

All this has been going so fast that Microsoft needed to do something. Of course, they have a newer version of Internet Explorer (IE8 is included in Windows 7 and can be downloaded freely. But this was not enough, too many people were starting to complain that Microsoft may wait about a month before updating IE6 in the normal update cycle. Even worse, some experts started telling the world that Microsoft actually was aware of this flaw in IE6 for many months. In such conditions, not doing anything usually turns out to produce a public relations nightmare and prepares for bad wind.

So, Microsoft rushed an out-of-band update to IE6 and Windows Update is now offering the correction to all Windows users still using IE6 (of course, you still have to use Windows Update and it is well known that too many people do not have this configured or do not accept the proposed updates – this is wrong and one the reasons so many PCs are infected with Trojan horses, virus and adwares). Now, if you did not move to a later Windows version and if you did not take advantage of the much better IE7 or IE8, it’s time to upgrade your old hag.

We can expect to see a few more updates to this story in the future, but there is a lesson to be learned (by Google, and most Internet users):

Always keep your browser up-to-date and refrain from clicking on any link in a mail message you did not expect.

Additionally, there is a lesson for Microsoft:

Sorry! but even the older software has to be kept alive when you are or have been the near-monopoly on this technology. This comes with responsibilities.

It’s worth noticing it if you are using Opera. I had a difficult-to-solve issue recently.

While playing with the idea of starting to use IPv6 on my main PC, I tested the waters by validating this option in the network configuration of my Windows XP. Unfortunately, Opera is already fully ready for IPv6 but my router box is not. So, the first effect it had is that Opera decided to enforce the use of IPv6 for all web sites that mentioned IPv6 capacity in their DNS (not many of them, but Google and Free.fr my ISP are already in the list). The immediate effect was that Opera tried to connect to them in IPv6 but failed (because the rest of my home configuration is not 100% IPv6). For 99% of all web sites, there was no difference…

It took me several days (and some Googling – using Safari and Chrome) to understand that this is a known issue and to remove the (still) useless IPv6 Windows configuration.

I’ll have to upgrade my router and try again.

Now, Opera is launching a beta test version 10 of the browser. And it has amazingly interesting new features.

• Fast browsing on slow connections
• Tab browsing enhanced and flexible
• Speed dial from the empty new page
• Web mail integration
• Re-sizable search field
• Much faster web engine and impressively standards-compliant
• In-line spell checker (I use it a lot to support my blogging habits)
• Auto-update (better than merely asking you to check for updates)
• Mouse control

Even better, after testing it in alpha, I can tell you that it is quite stable. The beta version should stay that way and that is a good thing too.

You can download it here.

• On March 26, Opera was announced to be the very first browser to succeed to obtain a 100/100 or 100% test score.
• Safari 3.1 is the first non-beta release of Safari for Windows (usually Safari is available on Mac OsX). While it is still unfinished, it reached the imposing 100% score only a few days after Opera.
• Internet Explorer 8 which is still in closed beta has been said to be able to pass the test, then not to, then again. It seems that Microsoft has the code for a 100% score but feels it should not be the default operation of its future browser.

Reference: The Acid3 test page.