Thursday, June 12, 2008

An exciting month for the browser wars

The official Opera 9.5 was released today, promising a 50% speed improvement and many features: the speed dial, fraud protection and a lot of emphasis on synchronization capabilities.

In similar news, the long awaited Firefox 3 is set to be released next tuesday, boasting the "Awesome Bar", improved security and memory management.

Not to be left behind, the Safari team announced a sneak peak for the upcoming Safari 4, which will boast a score of 100/100 on Acid3 and lightning fast javascript with the new SquirrelFish engine.

In Microsoft land, we're not gonna see anything exciting until August, but they did announce that they are pouring efforts to help adoption of IE8 by IT professionals. While it doesn't sound like much, I think this is an important step for Microsoft and the standards movement, seeing how IE7 adoption didn't quite catch on and we're still stuck supporting IE6 for corporate clients in this day and age.

It's interesting that, despite being competitors, each browser team is focusing on very different things: Opera is betting big on mobile, Firefox is putting a lot of effort into stability and community support, Safari wants to be the bleeding edge technology showcase and Microsoft is focusing in compatibility and migration efforts.

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