As you probably know Opera beat Firefox to the finish line this time (see yesterdays post). However, the long wait is finally over. Mozilla announced Wednesday that Firefox 3 will be available as of 17th June - that’s on Tuesday next week

Great news and really big expectations. 34 months of active development, and with the contributions of thousands, this should be the greatest release ever from Mozilla and maybe also the best browser…

In the meanwhile you can play around with the 3rd release candidate, or sign up for the Guinness WR download attempt and hope for an even earlier release date…

Opera Software today released to the world the final public release of its flagship Web browser, Opera 9.5. Opera’s cross-device expertise, support for open Web standards and commitment to speed and performance culminate to create the most powerful Opera browser yet. Making its desktop debut in Opera 9.5, Opera Link blurs the boundaries between computers and mobile phones by enabling a seamless Web experience from device to device. Opera 9.5 for Windows, Mac and Linux systems is available free from www.opera.com.

What’s new in Opera 9.5 according to themselves:

Opera Link: Your bookmarks, Speed Dial and even notes taken in the Opera browser can follow you anywhere. Opera Link keeps you synchronized between any Opera 9.5 desktop browser and Opera Mini, Opera’s free browser for your mobile phone.

Find anything: If you can remember a word from a page you’ve read earlier, you can find that page easily with Quick Find. Just enter a word in the address bar to find matching text from any page you have visited.

Looking sharp: Opera makes a move to modernize its look and feel to a sharp new skin with clean lines and clear icons. The ‘New Tab’ button and other elements have been modified to make the switch to a better Web experience more intuitive. Also supports platform-specific skins.

Strengthened defence against malware and phishing: Powered by Haute Secure, Netcraft, and PhishTank, Opera’s Fraud Protection technology automatically blocks offending Web pages to keep you out of harm’s way.

Speed: Opera continues to lead in performance. Opera 9.5 makes dramatic speed improvements to the e-mail client, RSS feeds and the browser itself, so you can spend more time getting things done online.

“Opera 9.5 represents the culmination of two years spent listening to our community and transforming our browser to add features and capabilities they have requested,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “Opera 9.5 offers new possibilities and capabilities. It’s faster, lighter and pushes us further out in front of other browsers, by blending the mobile and desktop worlds together in new and powerful ways. We invite everyone to join us as we continue to shape the way the Web will evolve.”

My first impressions according to myself:

The bookmark thing is probably a good thing but I tend to get reminded of important things by my wife, through twitter, news feeds etc. Also the Quick find thing doesn’t seem as fantastic as I’m not comfortable having the browser keeping track of all the pages I’ve visited…

However, my biggest disappointments are design and speed. The browser still uses WAY TOO MUCH space to display the most useful toolbars. Almost twice the space compared to Firefox. Also it appears that rendering fast also means rendering inaccurate. If image size is not set you will have to reload the page several times before it looks “normal”.

Browser security is definitely a good thing, but if you have a decent anti-virus program and firewall it might just be slowing things down. Most threats are directed against IE anyway, so until Opera’s market share grows this doesn’t seem too important.

The most positive news is that it scores 83/100 on the new Acid3 test - congratulations Opera!

Feel free to comment, disagree, argue and share

More info here, here and here.

After 8 security fixes last year (according to Secunia) the Danish security company CSIS named Apple Quicktime as the biggest isolated security risk of 2007. Today Apple announces its third major fix this year.

The main 5 is listed below (source: Secunia):

1. A boundary error when parsing packed scanlines from a PixData structure in a PICT file can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted PICT file.
2. An error in the processing of AAC-encoded media content can be exploited to cause a memory corruption via a specially crafted media file.
3. A boundary error in the processing of PICT files can be exploited to cause a heap-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted PICT file.
4. A boundary error in the processing of Indeo video codec content can be exploited to cause a stack-based buffer overflow via a specially crafted movie file with Indeo video codec content.
5. An error in the handling of “file:” URLs can be exploited to e.g. execute arbitrary programs when playing specially crafted QuickTIme content in QuickTime Player.

As the “trend” seems to continue I’ll use alternative media players (as I’ve always done), and it appears you should do it too…

Project Honey Pot is the first and only distributed system for identifying spammers and the spambots they use to scrape addresses from your website. Using the Project Honey Pot system you can install addresses that are custom-tagged to the time and IP address of a visitor to your site.

If one of these addresses begins receiving email they not only can tell that the messages are spam, but also the exact moment when the address was harvested and the IP address that gathered it.

Help stop spammers before they even get your address!

To participate in Project Honey Pot, webmasters need only install the Project Honey Pot software somewhere on their website. We handle the rest — automatically distributing addresses and receiving the mail they generate. As a result, we anticipate installing Project Honey Pot should not increase the traffic or load to your website.

The more people that participate the better. Start now by creating an account and set up the code.

Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer Touts Vista-To-XP Downgrade Program. The licensing policy for Windows Vista lets customers downgrade it to Windows XP, Ballmer notes.

CEO Steve Ballmer has a unique sales pitch for the company’s Windows Vista operating system — if you don’t like it, you can turn it into Windows XP.

Referring to Microsoft licensing policies that allow customers who purchase an operating system to legally install predecessor versions on their PCs, Ballmer noted that the program allows customers who aren’t satisfied with Vista to use XP.

“Customers get both,” said Ballmer, during a brief interview at an event Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

Ballmer was responding to a question about whether Microsoft would extend Window’s XP’s shelf life beyond its scheduled June 30 expiration for the broader PC market. The company earlier this week said it would give XP a reprieve for installations on ultra-low cost desktops.

Ballmer implied that an extension for mainstream PCs isn’t in the cards because customers who want XP past June 30 can simply purchase Vista and exercise the downgrade option. “I don’t know how you can do better than getting both,” he said.

A number of PC makers, including Dell, are offering business systems that have been “pre-downgraded” from Vista to XP.

Ballmer’s comments indicate that Microsoft does not view the downgrade program as a mere licensing loophole through which a few disgruntled customers can retain access to Windows XP. Rather, it appears that the company is now formally endorsing the program and may in fact be counting on it to spur sales of Vista, which many businesses have rejected due to its hefty hardware requirements and incompatibilities with older applications.

The situation raises questions about sales figures that Microsoft has provided for Vista. In April, the company said it had sold more than 140 million Vista licenses since the OS became available to the public early last year. But Microsoft did not indicate what percentage of those Vista licenses have been downgraded to XP.

A number of organizations in the government and commercial markets have said they may bypass Vista and jump directly from XP to Windows 7 when the latter becomes available in late 2009 or early 2010.