A number of readers have sent word about Opera Software ASA's antitrust complaint against Microsoft filed with the EU. Here is Opera's press release on the filing. The company wants the EU to "obligate Microsoft to unbundle Internet Explorer from Windows and/or carry alternative browsers pre-installed on the desktop" and to "require Microsoft to follow fundamental and open Web standards accepted by the Web-authoring communities." The latter request makes this a case to watch. Will the Commissioner take the Acid2 test using IE7?

DaMan writes "ZDNet picks up on yesterday's Firefox 3 beta 1 review by comparing the memory usage of Firefox 2 against the latest beta. The results from one of the tests is quite interesting, after loading 12 pages and waiting 5 minutes, 2 used 103,180KB and 3 used 62,312KB. IE used 89,756KB.""

Kelson writes "The Internet Explorer team has updated the installer for IE7. Mostly they've adjusted a few defaults and updated their tutorials, but one change stands out: The installer no longer requires Windows Genuine Advantage validation. Almost a year after its release, IE7 has yet to overtake its predecessor. Was WGA holding back a tide of potential upgrades, or did it just send people over to alternative browsers?"

Abhinav Peddada writes "Ars Technica takes Opera 9.5, the latest from Opera's stable, for a test run and finds some interesting results, including it being a 'solid improvement to an already very strong browser.' On the performance front, Ars Technica reports 'Opera 9.5 scored slightly higher (281ms) than the previous released version, 9.23 (546ms). And Opera 9.x, let it be known, smacks silly the likes of Firefox and Internet Explorer, which tend to have results in the 900-1500ms range on this test machine (a 1.8 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB RAM). Opera was 50 percent faster on average than Firefox, and 100 percent faster than IE7 on Windows Vista, for instance.'"

jrowl writes "Opera 9.5 Alpha is scheduled to be released tomorrow, and CyberNet has a review of the browser's new features based on preview code. Some of the most prominent new options include a full history search, bookmark and Speed Dial syncing, and an 'Open with' menu option to pull up a website in another browser that's installed on your PC. 'This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you'll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You'll then be able to access that data whether you're at work, home, or anywhere! To setup synchronization just select the "Synchronize with My Opera" option from the File Menu.' There's also a video to go along with the text."

With several new areas of expansion for Opera The Register took a few minutes to talk to Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner. The interview addresses several of the most recent news items on the Opera front including, the adoption to Nintendo's Wii console, several advocates switching to Firefox, and others. "We just try to focus on our side. We've always focused on a somewhat richer interface. We've had a lot of negative comments ourselves over the years; for example, when we introduced tabbed browsing a lot of people said it doesn't make sense. We've introduced things like zooming, mouse gestures and the like - and we find they find their way into other browsers; tabs found their way into IE7. We are being copied, but we would like to focus on features and giving users a good experience."

rarwes writes "A website is aiming at blocking Firefox users. This because a fraction of the Firefox users installed an Ad Blocker and are therefor 'stealing money' from website owners that use ads. They recommend using IE, Opera or IE tab. From the site: 'Demographics have shown that not only are FireFox users a somewhat small percentage of the internet, they actually are even smaller in terms of online spending, therefore blocking FireFox seems to have only minimal financial drawbacks, whereas ending resource theft has tremendous financial rewards for honest, hard-working website owners and developers.' Be interesting to see where they are getting their numbers from.

Eatfrank writes "A recent CNet article suggests that Mozilla should pipe a lite version of Firefox into older PCs to further attack IE's dominance: 'Firefox supporters, take note. A bare-bones Firefox will get the browser into more houses, increasing the Fox's market share and keeps it in novice users' eyes for when they get a new PC ... a truly great super-lightweight browser would have the security of Firefox, without the add-ons, without the tabs, yes, even without favourites, history lists and customisability. The Firefox name is synonymous with security and Web-browsing vigilance. Why not give this to the processing lightweights of the PC world?'"

Tookis writes "Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. In some key European markets FF has already reached parity and is threatening to overtake IE as the market leading browser."

Albert Sandberg writes "According to a developer blog, it looks like Opera 9.5 (which has been code-named Kestrel) will be the first browser to fully support the CSS selector test (test is here). Finally! Weekly builds should start being available in a few weeks."

Bobcat writes "Ars Technica has a 'first look' at Safari for Windows, which is interesting because it's written from the perspective of someone new to Safari. It was tested against Firefox 2 and IE7 and aside from the slightly faster page loading, Ars didn't find much to recommend it to Windows users. 'The modest increase in rendering performance is hardly worth the deficiencies, and Safari's user interface simply doesn't provide the usability or flexibility of competing products. 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.'"

Thwomp writes "I love using my Wii to catch up on my Google Reader feeds and now that activity is officially supported by Google. It's really great to see that the Google Reader team has created an improved user interface optimized for the Wii's Opera browser and Wiimote. You can also try out the Google Reader for Wii in your browser. Google account is mandatory, of course."

Phantom of the Opera writes "The BBC reports that using self-assembled polymers and copying natural patterns, IBM hopes to have microchips that are 30% faster and consume 15% less energy. The secret? Adding a little nothing in all the right places."

Kelson writes to mention Microsoft, Mozilla, Opera and Google took the stage this week at the Web 2.0 expo and in addition to discussing pressing issues have declared their intent to avoid another browser war. All the panelists agreed that security was the largest concern currently facing browser developers. "Brendan Eich, the chief technology officer at Mozilla, said that security was hard and always will be. 'I don't think we should take security lightly; it's an end-to-end problem and we have to step outside the current model to win on this front,' he said. For his part, Chris Wetherell, a software engineer at Google, said one of the scenarios that kept him awake at night was offline access to the browser and what that meant from a security perspective, particularly on the user-to-user front."

CVG points out that, as of today, the final version of the Wii Opera browser is available for download. Make sure and do the update sometime in the next month or so; as you might recall from the original announcement, it will only be free until the end of June. "You can finally ditch the trial version of the Opera browser and download the full and final package, which comes with added features, such as 'www.' and '.com' buttons as well as improved functionality like a faster boot-up and better zoom capability. You can download it right now for free, first by updating your system, then grabbing the update from the Wii Software page on the Shop Channel."

foo fighter writes "The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has been slumbering the past several years: HTML was last updated in 1999, XHTML was last updated in 2002, and no one is taking seriously their largely incompatible work on 'next-generation' XHTML or 'modularized' XHTML. Both HTML and XHTML are in sorry need of removing deprecated items while being updated to reflect the current practices of web and browser developers and remaining compatible with legacy Recommendations. The much more open and transparent WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), formed in 2004 to address this problem, and has been hard at work on developing a draft spec for HTML5 to update and replace legacy versions of both HTML and XHTML. The quality of this work has reached the point that Apple, Opera, and Mozilla have requested the adoption of HTML5 as the new 'W3C Recommendation' for Web development."

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According to the german tech-site heise.de, the Mozilla Foundation is suing Microsoft over the use of tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer 7. The Mozilla Foundation owns the patent 5,160,296 through one of their developers (Solomon Katz, a former Opera dev) and has begun suing Microsoft in Mountainview, California. The Foundation wants that MS immediately ceases to distribute IE 7 and pays 1.4 Billion dollars in damages. Heise reports that Microsoft has issued no official response, but is contemplating to ship IE 7 NT (no tabs).

An anonymous reader writes "MSN has up an article that explores why Sci-Fi is associated with cheesy Space-Operas and children's movies, and cerebral Sci-Fi films don't make it unless they are adulterated into 'Action' flicks. The piece covers upcoming projects like 'The Last Mizmey' and 'Next', and points the finger at the ultimate culprit: George Lucas. 'When Lucas made Star Wars in 1977, he was paying tribute to a subgenre of science fiction that he loved dearly as a boy: the space opera. But although the breathless serial adventures of Flash Gordon and his ilk had their pleasures, they were often treated with tolerance, at best, by more serious science-fiction writers and readers. Nevertheless, the success of Star Wars changed the movie industry's perception of science fiction forever. As much as we love Star Wars for what it is, it nearly killed Hollywood's willingness to fund science-fiction movies that actually said something about the human condition.'"

Thelomen writes "Opera Browser contains an Easter egg that is not widely known, recently reported over at OperaWatch.com: type /. in the address bar and you are taken directly to slashdot.org. Other recent news from Opera is their new Speed Dial feature, present in the most recent build from Desktop Team. At first glance Speed Dial just looks like 9 bookmarks you can open with CTRL+1 to CTRL+9. However, the pages on the Speed Dial are shown in thumbnail and are automatically pre-fetched in background — a useful thing if you have some heavy pages among your top bookmarks."

Citing the Wii's ability to browse the internet via the Opera browser, a Christian group based out of California is planning on targeting the console with a smear campaign, Kotaku reports. The site has gotten ahold of a leaked press release from the upcoming 'Porn Talk' media event. From the release: "Like many new gaming technologies, the Wii's wireless internet capabilities make it a portal to porno. 'Parents think the computer is the only way for their kids to get porn on the internet. Unfortunately, they are dead wrong,' says Mike Foster, founder of ThePornTalk.com. 'Gaming devices like the Wii and the PSP aren't just for fun games anymore. You're able to surf the net, chat with friends, email, and view porn because of its internet access. Kids know this but parents don't!'"