opera 9

Apr 27 2009

Browser Bonanza

Opera (recently made free), Firefox and Flock have all released new versions, and they all come with great new features from feed handling to eye candy.

Firefox 2.0b1

firefox2b1 Browser Bonanza

New in 2.0:

  • Inline Spell Check (not shown) checks spelling in input boxes
  • New Feed Interface supports different feed readers including Google Reader and Bloglines
  • Search While You Type suggestions
  • Close Tab Buttons on the tab

Opera 9

opera9 Browser Bonanza

New in 9:

  • Widgets! Cool, but I wish you cold resize them
  • Integrated Bittorrent
  • Hover-over Tab Previews show you thumbnails and page info
  • Improved Richtext Formatting

Flock beta 1

flock07 Browser Bonanza

New in .7:

  • Drag and Drop Flickr integration
  • Search Auto-complete from history, bookmarks and more
  • RSS News View with a newspaper style layout and nice feed management
  • Better Support for Firefox Extensions

Wow. Unless you’re still hung on IE 5, there’s at least one cool new browser to try out. Have fun.

Brian

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Apr 27 2009

Best Freeware of 2007

Free got better this year, here’s how:

Best on the Web: Safari 3 beta/MobileSafari/Safari for Windows beta

Its always a slug-fest for king of the browser heap. This year, we went with a browser that has expanded its reach to Windows and into your pocket. in 2007 Safari saw a promising beta (with features like contextual search and spell check), moved to Windows and best of all, debuted on the iPhone. Screenshot shows Safari 3 beta with excellent SafariStand add-on.

safari3bstand Best Freeware of 2007

Honorable mention goes to the fast and streamlined Opera 9.5 beta and the maturing social browser Flock.

Freeware Classic: NCX

In the year of the iPhone, it is only fitting to recognize Apple’s gone-but-not-forgotten handheld, the Newton. Kept alive by an active community, the free utility NCX is the OS X reincarnation of the old Newton desktop sync utility NCU. NCX is evidence of longevity off the Apple community.

NCX Best Freeware of 2007

It is also worth mentioning that past freeware classic winner OpenOffice.org released its first native OS X alpha version this year. So next year is already looking good.

Best App Killed by Apple: Virtue Desktop

No emails, we’re just having fun here. Not quite as bad as Tiger’s Dashboard/Konfabulator ruckus, it is fair to say that the ever-useful Virtue Desktop may have seen its day.

Back to my Mac will probably ding Chicken of the VNC, another great free utility.

Best System Extension: Think

think1 Best Freeware of 2007

This year was big on distraction-free computing. Think is a great screen-dimmer that looks cool and forces distractions into the background.

Honorable mention goes to Google Desktop Search for coming to the Mac (although it is debatable how much we needed it) and RCDefault a great little app for managing file associations.

Best Mac-only: Skitch

I don’t see how any windows user could not drool over this one. Skitch has a great interface, easy to use tools and flexible sharing options.

Honorable mention goes to xPad, a great free text editor and Bean, a free and slick word processor.

Best Technical Performance: MacFUSE

This gem came out of nowhere to add NTFS, WebDAV, SSH and FTP support for mounting remote file systems. MacFusion makes this new feature easy to use. Check it out.

iPhone App: AppSnap’s jailbreakme.com

It could not have been more simple or clever: free your iPhone or iPod touch by simply loading a webpage. Oh, and lets fix a major vulnerability while we’re at it. Genius!

Look for more in this space as 3rd party apps go legit in 2008!

Lifetime Achievement Award: ImageWell

imagewell2 Best Freeware of 2007

We first featured ImageWell in 2003 and it has tacked on features ever since. It was the first and remains among the best quick image editors and has since spawned a whole new category of Mac app.

Another great year! Be sure to check back with us in 2008 for more great Mac and iPhone freeware.

Brian

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Dec 19 2006

Opera 9.1 released. Includes phising protection.

Opera Software today introduced real-time Fraud Protection in Opera 9.1. Fraud Protection includes technology from GeoTrust, the leading digital certificate provider, and PhishTank, a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the internet. Fraud Protection is available in Opera 9.1, the newest version of Opera’s free web browser.

PhishTank, operated by OpenDNS and community members, enables anyone to submit, verify, track and openly share phishing data. The open access of PhishTank, and the use of PhishTank data in Opera, is intended to encourage the sharing of information and increase the chance of eliminating phishing all together.

Fraud Protection extends the original anti-phishing capability in Opera. Opera 8 introduced the security information field to help determine if a phishing site was masquerading as a trusted and verified site. Fraud Protection adds a new level of online safety by working in real-time to protect Opera users from the latest phishing attacks.

Note:

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