It’s pretty hard to think that the Opera browser is somehow going to jump up into first place; it’s taken years for FireFox to get the sort of awareness to compete with Internet Explorer.  Google Chrome is now similarly joining the fray by advertising its free browser via TV and all other sorts of advertisements; and even then, it’s going to take a long while before there’s much market movement at truly competitive levels.

Even so, I’ve been using Opera in OS X for a few months now, and it continues to get better and better.  Today, I tried out Opera’s 10.50 beta 1, available at opera.com/browser/next/.  The difference from this beta and previous stable version, 10.10, is that it is a) much faster, and b) utilizing the native OS X Cocoa system.  Ergo, re: #2, it’s a lot more integrated and “Mac like” than it was in previous iterations.  Integrated light weight IMAP support is still moving along nicely, too: I’m getting all the features I want, without any of the ones I don’t.  It is, of course, a beta, and I’ve had reason to restart the application a bit more often than normal.  With that said, though, the future of Opera looks to be bright, in my opinion, and I can only hope that they continue with such a well-designed, quality product.