Wandering electrons... but not too far

Hoo boy hoo boy!!!

The Desktop Opera Team released the alpha version of Opera 9.5 (aka "Kestrel") today.

You can download it here for a test drive. It will install itself beside your stable opera version by default, so no worries about losing your current stable version. On this same page you have a brief overview of what's new.

Here's the announcement from the desktop team, from which you can look at the platform-specific change logs.

Remember it's currently just an alpha; you can expect to run into bugs, which can be reported here. However you will want to "check the Known Issues list in the changelogs and discuss them in the forums or newsgroups first." (desktop team)

Critical Firefox security flaw discovered

Oh uh, sorry, that was mean.

As was the case at wired news and Ars Technica, Extremetech.com has few nice things to say about the Safari Beta for Windows recently released by Apple. They've decided moreso to give you Ten Reasons Not to Use Safari on Windows.

Their recommendation:

If you really want to be different and superior in terms of browser speed and look, we recommend Opera, which has proven security, plenty of sidebar options, and lickety-split page rendering.

Thanks are in order to iliad for posting this article in the forums today (here and here).

I will add a disclaimer here: All this might give the impression that I have a chip on my shoulder against Safari. This isn't the case. In fact, I thing that the arrival of Safari in the Windows world might actually be a good thing. However, I find it strange that Apple released this not-at-all ready for primetime "beta"... They've GOT to know that the competition on the other side of the fence is pretty darn rude with IE7, Firefox and Opera (especially:D) all proposing top-class browsers these days.

The theory is out there that they did this just to make the Safari browser a bit more familiar to people for the release of the Iphone. Maybe. But really, I think they've done themselves more harm than good here...

EDIT: The day after writing this I found still another article at Eweek.com. The title says it all: "Safari on Windows Falls Short of Top Browsers".

And when it comes to browsers, Eweek knows what they're talking about.

Tooltips are the little yellow boxes that appear when you hover on certain elements. You might have noticed that Opera seems to have more of them than other browsers. It's not your imagination.

Read more...

As was the case for wired.com in yesterday's post, Ars Technica has little good to say about the Safari for Windows beta.

The article ends with, "If the folks at Apple think that providing Windows users with a taste of Mac OS X through Safari is going to entice them to buy a Mac, it's going to take a better effort than the Safari 3 beta. Even if the final release is more polished and completely bug-free, it still won't be as powerful or feature-loaded as Opera or Firefox."