The regular Opera browser doesn’t have any chances to take the throne from Internet Explorer(Firefox will surely dethrone IE) but its version for mobile phones named Opera Mini surely pwnes the competition!

Opera Mini 4.1 was in beta stage for quite a while and it was about time they released the final version! If you want a super fast browser on your Blackberry or new-gen mobile phone Opera Mini is the ideal solution! It will make you put away your laptop on trips and fully use your phone’s web features, meaning that you will be able to blog/IM/browse in great comfort and satisfaction.

The new version of Opera Mini features a more user friendly GUI(general user interface):

The address bar works similar to the T9 editor at phones(when writing and SMS T9 tries to complete the word reducing your writing time), so it will try to present you similar matches using your browse history and bookmarks.

Opera claims that its new version for mobile phones provides 50% faster browsing, because all the data goes trough the Opera servers.(i tried it out on a friend’s Blackberry and i was pretty impressed by the increased speed).

The new Opera Mini will let you search for text on web pages using its built-in search. This can save you a lot of time, trust me on this.

If you connect your phone with your PC using Opera Link you will be able to sync your bookmarks on the PC with the bookmarks on your mobile phone! I Love this feature, all my bookmarks got transfered within seconds to my friend’s blackberry(i deleted them after, it was just for testing).

44 Million people just can’t be wrong, if you wish to know more about this exciting new version of Opera Mini feel free to watch Catherine’s presentation

Woohoo! Its really nice to see that Microsoft finally included IE7 in automatic updates for Windows XP. And the best part is that most of the windows users choose express install when installing updates, meaning that they don’t check what they are installing.

Cool isn’t it? If you would do the same you would run the express install and after rebooting your PC you would be like “WTF? What happened to my Internet explorer?…it changed!”

This is a good thing, mostly for web designers. IE6 doesn’t respect web standards, and in most cases websites have a different style sheet for ie6. which means extra work. IE6’s era has come to an end,all you IE6 fans: its time to just let go and switch to IE7.

According to www.w3scools.com firefox is more popular than ie6, beating it with 5.2%, and having a total of 37.2%. If we combine IE5, IE6, IE7 usage percentages we get that the Internet Explorer versions are still dominating with a total of 54.7% this meaning that more than half of the population uses it.

Internet Explorer 8 is on the way and it seems that it will be quite a big hit, but remember that Firefox 3 is  coming out in the next 3 months, and i don’t think that IE8 will stand a chance!