The Playground

Mozilla has set Tuesday 17 June for release of the next version of Firefox and an attempt to set a Guinness World Record for software downloads for software downloads.

And not to be outdone, the final version of Opera 9.5 was released today, adopting a modernized look and feel while strengthening anti-phishing and -malware features. Of particular interest: excellent support for current standards (X)HTML, XML, XSLT, CSS 2.1, SVG 1.1 and partial implementations of new emerging standards CSS 3, HTML 5, and ARIA.

In response, Microsoft has had to add new features to IE in an effort to make it more innovative. On Wednesday, the company unveiled new features for IE’s next version, IE 8, aimed at making deploying and managing the browser easier for IT professionals. IE 8 beta 2 is scheduled to be available in August.

With IE8, Microsoft is hoping to get itself out of a jam that became glaringly apparent in IE7. With that release Microsoft attempted to improve its support for web standards, but in doing so caused some websites - those designed to display well in Microsoft’s older, less standards-compliant browsers - to work poorly. Microsoft has said that with IE8 it hopes to support web standards as well as sites designed for older versions of the browser.