Feanor

You probably already know it, Firefox 3.5 has been released: Browse in the Fast Lane
You can find the release notes over there but in short all the changes in this version are for geeks so if you aren't a geek, Firefox 3.5 will look exactly the same as Firefox 3. So why should you update? Because of the many bugs that have been fixed and some performance improvements.

A side note about "privacy". All the browsers today offer the "privacy mode" feature. Beware that it only means the browser will not cache visited pages on your disk, the cookies and so on. But it will still give away your IP address and your HTTP referrer data to all the sites you visit and of course everything you do on the Internet can be logged along the way, for example by your local network administrator or your ISP. So "privacy" here only means your wife can't probably see the sites you have visited but you aren't invisible to others and you are still being tracked as before.

Another thing that I don't get well is all this hype about "performance/speed", that in short means fester JS execution. But this leads to the question about all these people who want to reinvent the Web.

I use Opera (the browser) and I have insisted for years when developing sites in order to make them support Opera as well as other browsers. But I must admit Opera is not my primary browser since I am more a Firefox user. I am not a "fanboy" of any software then.
That said, I found this article that summarizes some of my doubt about "Unite" and adds some more. It is detailed and written much better than I ever could.

http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2009/06/16/thoughts-on-opera-unite/

My opinion is the issue here is not technical, being "Unite" a cool tool.
It is more about marketing, like I said in a previous post.
I get really annoyed by this sort of marketing tactics, especially when I don't see the need for it.

I turned and I saw Martina standing for the first time.This is the sequence of her standing the second time.
In case you wonder, I hate using the flash with babies.
That is why pictures are so dark.

I am trying Opera 10 Beta and so far I can say:
1. the beta installer should create a new "group" in "programs" and a new icon on the desktop instead of overwriting the existing Opera 9x stuff. It is annoying but not catastrophic because fortunately it creates a new profile. Careful with the default settings.
2. the structure of the profile and subdirs is different from Opera 9.x. I don't know what happens if you merge the two.
3. it looks more responsive in heavy pages and JS than Opera 9.x.
4. the new default skin is much better than the old one, way less "heavy". It remembers a little of Chrome. I still don't like the grey-black colors and the omni-present gradient effect. The "panels" on the left look ugly.
5. there is an inline spell checker finally but it seems it doens't work too well because it stopped working while I was typing this.
6. the "turbo" mode is nothing new since proxies are as old as the Internet. I am not going to use it because I don't need a compressed Web and because the big issue about proxies, besides the bandwidth and hardware limitations, is the activity logging then privacy concerns.
7. the "visual tabs", that is a preview of the tab content you can have in an area on top of the browser, looks like a cool trick I won't ever use because it takes away too much screen space. You can have the preview the same with the mouse rolling over the tab.

You can have updates on Opera here: http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/