Microsoft has been busy churning out news at PDC09, already having announced the arrival of Office 2010's public beta and Internet Explorer 9.

Not to be done by Adobe's recent unveiling of Flash 10.1, Microsoft has taken the wraps off Silverlight 4 beta. A few of the key changes in the new version include support for Google Chrome, performance gains up to 200% over Silverlight 3, and multi-touch support.

Silverlight's Deep Zoom has also been turbo-charged with hardware acceleration. v4 can also tap into your webcam and microphone, and local recording capabilities have been added. Microsoft hopes Silverlight 4 will allow developers to go beyond the browser and create rich desktop applications -- another salvo at the Adobe camp.

There are a slew of additions and enhancements aimed at developers, network administrators, and kiosk environments -- you can check a complete listing out in the offical release announcement.

Can't see the video embed in this post? You need to get your hands on the Silverlight plugin, I reckon. Runtimes are available for Windows and Mac here.

It's only three weeks into its development, but Internet Explorer 9 has officially been unveiled today at the Professional Developers Conference (PDC). In fact, as I write this now, they're still talking about IE9 and other tech advances over on the Microsoft PDC09 website.

Their goals with IE9 seem pretty obvious from the graphs shown in their presentation: faster, more standards-compliant website rendering. If you look at the slide above, lower is faster. And that's just three weeks into their development of a new browser and web rendering engine!

They're also including 'hardware accelerated' rendering using your graphics card using the DirectX D2D technology. Whether you're trying to perform funky stuff with CSS3, Javascript or DHTML, IE9 should render things a lot faster.

There's a big video (that requires Silverlight!) after the break. It explains and impressively-demonstrates the new DirectX D2D speed-up.

[via GeekSmack]

Over the past few years, Opera Mobile has become the browser of choice for the majority of Windows Mobile users. Shipped as the default browser on many devices and available as download for others, Opera Mobile addresses the many failings of the preinstalled IE browser with better performance, variable zoom and text reflowing as well as a polished and intuitive UI.

Pushing the mobile browser closer to a desktop grade experience is the promise of Opera's latest release, Opera 10 Beta for Windows Mobile.

The Opera Mobile 10 Beta overhauls the look and feel of it's predecessors and is similar in design to the Opera 10 desktop browser as well as the Java based Opera Mini 5 beta. The UI overhaul brings Opera's offering across all of it's platforms in line, as well as providing a great range of features from the desktop platform including Speed Dial, tabbed browsing, a password manager and Opera's server side compression technology, 'Opera Turbo'.

I've had a try of the new browser and it does indeed feel more consistent in style with Opera's Java based offering, no bad thing as Opera Mini has always made excellent use of the available screen real estate. Performance seems great and the UI seems intuitive. Some features found in previous releases don't seem to have made it into version 10 yet - we spotted a lack of device rotate support and no support for multitouch zoom on the HTC HD2, but Opera does look set to maintain it's class leading position on the Windows Mobile platform.

The Opera Mobile 10 Beta is available for free download now from the Opera website.

We've told you before about Google Chrome's slick new bookmark syncing feature, available in the Windows beta version of Chrome 4. It automatically keeps your bookmarks synced across multiple Chrome installations, using your Google Account. Well, this feature has landed in recent builds of Chromium for Mac (that's the open-source project Chrome is based on). To enable it, you'll first need to grab the latest version of Chromium.

Bookmark sync isn't on by default. To use it, you'll have to pop open your Terminal and do a little command-line magic. You'll want to right-click Chromium, show package contents, and then find Chromium inside the MacOS folder. Drag that to the Terminal, and then add the argument --enable-sync. Chromium should open, and you should see bookmarking syncing in your preferences.

Sign in with your Google account, and your bookmarks will be synced automatically to any other Chromium/Chrome browsers that you sign into. If you want to see where they're stored on the web, check a slightly strange location: a Chrome folder in your Google Docs account.

I know it seems like a lot of trouble to go through for bookmark syncing, but such is the peril of being on the bleeding edge of browser development. Bookmark syncing will very likely pop up officially in the Chrome Mac beta scheduled for early December.

OS X browser geeks, start salivating ... Reports from around the web are saying that Google's Chrome browser might get a finished Mac version in about month. Stephen Shankland at CNET has been vigilantly monitoring the Chrome development mailing lists, and some talk about Chrome's new extensions UI reveals that the Mac launch is scheduled for early December.

Chrome 4 for Windows is in Beta already, while Mac and Linux only recently got their first developer previews. Since the highest-profile new feature in the Chrome 4 Beta is browser actions (Chrome's equivalent of Firefox's add-ons), developers are getting their extensions ready for launch. Apparently, a product manager for Chrome posted a message advising developers to switch to the new browser actions system so they'd have more time to get their code in shape for a beta launch in "early December."

The second beta version of Firefox 3.6 has arrived, following hot on the furry little heels of 3.6b1, which was only a week and a half old. Mozilla's touting a whopping 190 bug fixes in that time, many of them user-submitted. If you're using an older version of 3.6, you should definitely update.

In my personal experience with 3.6, I've found that most of my themes and several of my add-ons (including the essential Greasemonkey) haven't been updated yet. On the whole, however, it feels very fast (especially at startup) and has proven very stable.

All the major upgrades came in 3.6b1, but if you're using Firefox 3 or 3.5, here's what might entice you to give 3.6 a shot: it offers faster Javascript performance and startup time, built-in support for the Personas one-click theming system, full-screen video and poster frames. If you want to wait for the final version of 3.6, you'll be pleased to hear it's scheduled for December. If the quick turnaround on Beta 2 is any indication, Mozilla is back on track to make that deadline.

You are looking at the new logo for Firefox Mobile: The Pocketfox!

It looks more like some Harry Potter fan-art in my opinion -- someone with a Fawkes the Phoenix fetish -- but no matter! It's cute and very vibrant. It will certainly stand out, and ultimately that's what matters.

I can't help but wonder if the 'What's that in your pocket?' double entendre was intentional or not. I'd like to think the Mozilla developers have a sense of humor! If you want to find out more about Firefox Mobile (I don't think many people have heard of it), check out its 'Coming Soon...' page, which is full of juicy details about the new browser.

Mozilla have held a few contests recently. The one that's open at the moment -- 'Five years of Firefox' -- is open until December 9th. They're looking for poster ideas to celebrate their birthday. It feels like only yesterday that I held my Firefox 1.0 launch party...

What do you think of the new logo? Share your thoughts in the comments!

We've already mentioned other ways to power up Google Chrome. Before extensions arrived on the developer channel, Userscripts and bookmarklets were your only options. Both are still great ways to add some kick-ass functionality to Chrome. If you're running the stable or beta builds, you may want to stick to them for now.

• 10 handy Userscripts for Google Chrome users
• 15+ handy bookmarklets for Google Chrome (and other browsers, too!)

Now, onto the extensions!

If you have a favorite that I left off, feel free to share it in the comments!
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Mozilla's Camino, the lightweight Mac alternative to Firefox, is getting very close to a 2.0 release. The first release candidate is out now -- you can download it by checking for updates in an earlier version of the browser -- and it's got updates to appearance, security features and more. You'll notice a new, more Leopard-like look for the tabs and toolbars, making Camino blend in better with recent versions of OS X.

One of the best additions to the new version of Camino is a built-in Flash blocker. You can turn it on to block all Flash animations, and then add exceptions the sites whose Flash you actually want to see. Other security features include making use of Google Safe Browsing, which warns you when you're headed for a site that Google has blacklisted for malware or phishing. All-in-all, Camino 2 isn't as feature-packed as Firefox, or as pretty as Safari, but it's lighter than either one (and offers Firefox-equivalent page-load times using Mozilla's Gecko rendering engine).

[via TechCrunch]

When Opera 10 launched without one of its most-hyped features, Opera Unite, browser geeks had to install a separate build to test it out. Opera developers have now merged the two, integrating Unite into the main browser in Opera 10.10 Beta.

As we've reported before, Unite is a "web server within a web browser" that allows you to download and run various web applications. What does this mean for the average user? You can access your files from anywhere, and easily share them with friends.

The first Unite apps are all about sharing. There's a media player to share music, a general file storage app, a web server app to host sites, and even a "fridge" app where you can leave notes for your friends. Media Player will probably get a lot of the early hype, as it lets you stream music from your machine to another computer with iTunes, WInamp, or your other player of choice (as long as it supports streaming playlists). Unite is still in the early stages, but no other browser has even attempted to do what Opera is doing in this space.

When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

Just about everyone has a usb flash drive by now. Apart from all that data you're packing (which you no doubt have encrypted in case your drive gets lost -- but that's a post for another day), why not pack up your favorite web browser and take it along for the ride.

There are a lot more options than you think - here are 13 different options for users of Windows PCs. Don't see your choice on the list? Share it with us in the comments!

Mozilla

Portable Firefox (current) [download] and Portable Minefield [download]
John T. Haller's Portable Apps project is always right on top of the latest Firefox updates, so it's the place to go if you need the Fox in your pocket. The most recent unstable branch is provided as well, in case you want to test it without installing.

PocketFlock v2 [download]
The kicked-up Firefox remix for social networking types is also available in a portable version, thanks to enthusiast Dave Ferrite.

I admit it: Download Squad has been talking up Opera 10 all summer. We told you about its wicked-fast new JavaScript engine and the much-hyped Opera Unite, and then Lee told you why he hopes this latest version of Opera will get your attention. Now the day of reckoning has arrived: Opera 10 is here, for Windows, Mac and Linux. How does it stack up to our expectations? Well, there's some good news and some bad news. Good: the Turbo feature for faster browsing on slower Internet connections is in full effect. Bad: two of the most-wanted features - Opera Unite and the Carakan JavaScript engine - didn't make it into this release.

Is Opera 10 still worth going for? Well, it's definitely fast. I gave it a spin on some resource-intensive sites, and without any formal testing, I can say that page load times on my Mac felt at least as fast as those in Safari and Chrome. It also passes the Acid 3 Test with flying colors. Combine that with the slick-looking (and quite space-efficient) new UI and the Turbo feature, and you've got a legitimate candidate for your new favorite browser. And, when Unite finally arrives as a separate download, it should only get better.

Have you tried Opera 10? Will you be switching? Leave us your impressions in the comments.