FlyWEB's

I see the that Opera 9 is out in beta. According to the Opera 9 press release, it’s got some neat new features — among them, the ability to “customize your search engines” which, I hope, means the ability to add search engines to Opera’s search box easily. Right now, that’s quite a little feat for people not used to modifying desktop applications.

Another feature that I wish they’d implement: the ability to create folders in the RSS feeds tab. It would be nice for organizing feeds. But, dig this:

Thumbnail preview – It’s easy to have many tabs open at once in Opera. But exactly which tab had that video you wanted? Hover any tab to see a thumbnail preview.

I’d say that’s pretty fancy.

Unfortunately, I’m not trying the Opera 9 beta today; as usual, it’s a working weekend, and that means I’m supposed to be working. [gna gna]

According to this entry on MSBLOG, Microsoft plans to release further versions of Internet Explorer on an annual base. And although I have my concerns, I do like the plan.

No, I don’t use Internet Explorer, and neither I will in the future – after all, it will never be available natively for Linux. But up to now, it is the de facto standard browser for surfing the web, so developers have to ensure that their designs need to display correct at least in this browser, which is not that easy as one might think. In fact, all version of Internet Explorer up to version 6 have major problems when it comes to web standards like CSS. Unfortunately, in his five years of existence, Microsoft never updated the rendering engine of their latest browser.

Finally, IE7 made a step in the right direction with a proper implementation of CSS 2, as far as I can see. And after all, it’s Microsofts Browser who dictates what’s possible and whats not. When it comes to CSS 3, which will have some great features, the IE7 has no knowledge about it at all – although I have to admit, that Firefox’ and Operas support is also more rudimentary right now. With annual versions of Internet Explorer, there’s a slight hope that CSS3 can be used in a productive way yet in this decade.

So, it’s up to Microsoft. I hope that they do not made this announcement as a lame excuse to cover another patch under the hood of a new version. I hope that those new versions which they have in mind will also cover new features and do not stick only to fixing security related bugs. The Internet Explorer is the standard browser in the world wide web, and it will be for a long long time – so it will better be good.