Opera 10 beta is available for Download

Earlier today, the Opera desktop team announced the availability of the Opera 10 beta which is the latest build of the Opera browser.

This new build of Opera comes packed with a lot of new features, a fresh look and feel that is much pleasing and smoother than any of the other previous looks, and enhanced speed and performance. Plus it also marks a two-digit version milestone for the Opera browser.

The biggest new feature in Opera 10 beta is Opera Turbo. a state-of-the-art compression technology introduced in Alpha, which speeds up the loading of web-pages and helps the users on dial up make the most out of their Internet connection.

Other features include:

• An Interface-lift - Opera 10 has got a new look and feel, designed by a world-renowned designer.
• New visual tabs - New version has a resizable tab bar, with thumbnail preview of open tabs.
• Better Speed Dial - The most popular feature of Opera is now fully customizable.
• Inline spell-checker - Opera might be late on this one but a fully featured spell-checker is finally here.
• Developer tools - Dragonfly makes it easy for developers to test and debug their websites.

And many more.

Opera has always been praised for the simplicity it offers and perhaps with Opera 10, it will evolve into a full-featured mainstream web browser like Chrome, Firefox and Safari.

The first beta for Opera 10 is now available for download for all major OS platforms including Windows, Mac and Linux. Download Opera 10 beta now.

Download Safari 4 for Windows and Mac

Apple finally released the Safari 4 browser for all platforms today at the World Wide Developers Conference. The 'world's fastest browser' which had been in beta for a long time has now reached a stable milestone.

The stable version retains all the features previewed in the beta, while fixing numerous bugs.

The browser beats all the competition in the JavaScript testing conducted by Apple. Based on the Webkit engine, like Google Chrome, it gives a big competition to the likes of Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 8. Apple however didn't use the most recent builds available for the other browsers like Firefox 3.5 beta and Google Chrome 3 alpha, which have a lot of performance improvements.

Major features of Safari 4 include ultra fast browsing, panoramic home screen with previews of favorite sites, and even Cover Flow in history along with a huge memory footprint

Download Safari 4 for Windows and Mac.

How to Enable Private Browsing mode in Firefox 3.5?

A couple of days ago Mozilla released Firefox 3.5 and the new version of this ever-favorite web browser now brings a lot a lot of new features including a Private Browsing mode.

Private Browsing mode is now a days a standard feature in all of the state-of-the-art web browsers including IE8 and Google Chrome and now with Firefox 3.5, users can surf the web or do whatever they want without leaving any traces.

Here is how to enable Private Browsing mode in Firefox:

1. Make sure you have downloaded the latest version of Firefox 3.5
2. Open the Tools menu and click on 'Start Private Browsing' or use [Shift + Control + P]
3. A popup will ask you to confirm your decision so click on 'Start Private Browsing' again.
4. Now to end the session, simply go to Tools menu and click on 'End Private Browsing'.

When Private Browsing mode in Firefox is activated, all your browsing history, cookies and data is stored temporarily and as soon as the session ends, everything is flushed so no trace is left behind.

Free 90-day License for Norton Internet Security 2009

Keeping a PC clean and free from viruses can be a hard task, not to mention how expensive it is to purchase all those security solutions and products. But Symantec here wants to help you with this by giving you the opportunity to run Norton Internet Security 2009 totally free for 90 days.

The introductory subscription is being offered for a limited-time so get hold of it while you can.Follow this page to continue. It only works for Windows XP and Vista, sadly no support for Windows 7.

Norton Internet Security 2009 gives user access to some of the most reliable security products for PC such as the Norton Antivirus, Norton Personal Firewall, Norton Antispyware and Norton Antiphishing.

To proceed with the introductory subscription, follow the link to the page provided above and click 'Download Now' and install the application. Once the installation has completed, run the application. After a 90-day period, you will be asked to purchase a license key.

Yahoo! introduces a new and more social homepage

If you were not a fan of browser start-pages like iGoogle, Yahoo! and Live, wait till you see the revamped edition of the Yahoo! homepage which now boasts more social and interactive features.

Yahoo! has been working on a new homepage since September last year and finally this new edition of the homepage is being rolled out to everyone, starting from users in the U.S.

What's special about this new homepage is that Yahoo! has removed links to all those useless Yahoo! services in the sidebar and has replaced it with a 'My Favorites' portal which lets you add your favorite social networks, blogs, websites as widgets. This will allow users to synchronize with their social activity around the web, specially social networks like Flickr, Twitter and Facebook.

Yahoo! already provides some of the basic apps/widgets for you to add in the sidebar, however a widget from any URL can be created on the fly even if it does not have RSS. For future, Yahoo! plans to allow users to sync up the homepage customizations between their desktop and mobile.

As of now, the new homepage can be only be tested by logged in users at this address.

Be the first to use Google wave, register now

Desperately waiting to 'wave' through Google wave? Here is your chance to be the member of Google wave's exclusive bugs testing team. Yes! Thats true, Google has started its hunt for users from around the globe to use, test and enjoy the wave experience.

All you need to do is to register here and you can be one of the lucky 100,000 users to use Google Wave, registration process is simple and quick. You are only required to enter your email ID. There are a couple of questions as well which you can answer if you want to but it is strongly recommended that you answer those questions.

Don't forget to write a short message for the Google wave team, it only makes your application more strong. Google has not yet explained the selection procedure but if selected you will be able to test the tool before its public launch.

Widely considered to be the email killer, Google Wave is a personal communication and collaboration tool announced by Google in this year's Google IO conference. A combination of Email, instant messaging and social networking makes Google wave a fascinating tool to use. Google wave comes with a set of very strong APIs and it is open source which means the users can make extensions to Google wave.

In initial phase the tool will be made available to the selected 100,000 users on September 30 this year while the rest of the world will be able to 'wave' a month or two later.

Twitter suffers downtime due to Denial-Of-Service

A couple of hours ago Twitter experienced the longest downtime in history which resulted in a global 'black out' for the online micro blogging website. The site went down on the Thursday morning leaving millions of Twitterers frustrated.

Initially the twitter team was not clear about the problem as it posted on the twitter status blog:

Site is down, we are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly.

Upon further investigation, it was finally declared that the server went down because of a denial-of-service attack as posted on the twitter blog:

On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack.

Denial of Service attack is an attempt of paralyzing a server by increasing the work load of a server through external communication methods. This results in the consumption of the server's resources, which bars the actual users from using the 'victim' machine.

According to reports twitter is under a massive hack attack this time. Pertinent to know that twitter had been into the headlines in the past for its security loop-holes. We saw a number of twitter accounts being hacked be some hacker, leaking secret information.

The Twitter team is working on the problem as said by the Twitter blog:

We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.

Though Twitter is back but users are experiencing unusual delays and time-outs. Highlighting the matter, the twitter status blog says:

As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.

Others sites which experienced a similar DDoS attack were Facebook, LiveJournal and YouTube. The attack was generated from some parts of Russia and Germany.