Opera have released Opera 10.50 Beta 2 for Windows.

The new browser contains many significant improvements over Beta 1 according to Opera.

Changes include:

• Skin work, and tweaked styling of internal pages (opera:* and error pages)
• Improved opera:config
• Improved overlay authentication dialogs to avoid spoofing
• Context menu fixes
• Basic Web Storage user interface
• Lots of crash fixes
• Widgets fixes

A full list of changes can be found in the changelog. A download link can be found on the Opera Desktop Team Blog.

YouTube has announced that it is dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 on March 13. This comes just weeks after Google announced that it would start dropping support for the browser on Google services this year.

Internet Explorer 6 users are currently presented with a nice message urging them to upgrade to a newer browser.

“On March 13, we are dropping support for your browser. You’ll still be able to watch videos after this date, but new features may not work properly” reads the message.

This gives users two weeks notice, though it may be of little use to many IE6 users, who are stuck using the browser on corporate networks.

More Google services are dropping support for IE6 later this year, but no firm dates have yet been given.

Microsoft has begun testing of its new browser ballot screen for European Union countries.

The ballot screen, which can be seen at http://www.browserchoice.eu/, lists the 5 major browsers in a random order, followed by 8 lesser known browsers also in a random order.

Early testing by DSL.sk shows the ballot screen might not be as random as once thought, with testing showing that the screen appears to favour Google’s Chrome, while IE shows the least amount of favouritism.

These results could be an anomalie however, and may differ with further testing.

A Windows Update is available for download for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Windows 7 users in United Kingdom, Belgium and France.

Adobe has come out saying that it is confident that Apple will eventually cave and allow Flash to make it onto the iPhone.

“Our goal is to provide a consistent runtime that spans devices, inclusive of [mobile and] desktop operating systems,” said Flash marketing director Adrian Ludwig at this weeks Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Adobe is currently working on providing Flash on devices powered by Windows Mobile, Android, Palm WebOS, Symbian, and BlackBerry OS powered devices, delivering parity with the desktop versions of Flash.

“I suspect what will happen is that as we have more devices in the market… Apple will have more market pressure to include Flash on the iPhone,” said head of Adobe’s platform business David Wadhwani.

“Apple would like to move rich content off the web and into its App Store, where it can more readily monetise it….Ultimately, the consumer will decide.”

Adobe has a version of Flash ready to go for the iPhone, iPod Touch and the iPad, but is being blocked by Apple from getting low-level access to the iPhone that’s necessary to properly implement Flash.

Whether Adobe’s prediction will come true remains to still be seen, only time will tell.

Research In Motion (RIM) – the creators of the popular BlackBerry Phone – have announced at this weeks Mobile World Congress that they will release a WebKit based browser for its range of phones.

WebKit is the popular rendering engine found powering Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browsers.

A demonstration of an early build on a BlackBerry devices showed real promise, with fast rendering speeds and scoring a perfect 100/100 in the Acid3 test.

No news of when to expect the new browser, but we will let you know when we have more information.

A video demonstration of the browser in action can be seen after the break.

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Opera Software have released Opera 10.50 Beta 1 to the public, with a slew of stability and bug fixes since the first Alpha release.

New in Beta 1 is Aero Glass, Aero Peek, and Jumplists support for Windows 7 users, along with the new Opera Carakan JavaScript engine.

Early reviews and benchmarking shows Opera 10.50 is the new speed king, beating Google’s Chrome by as much as 20% in some tests.

A full list of changes can be found in the changelog, while Opera 10.50 Beta 1 can be downloaded from the Opera Next website.

Google Chrome developers have pushed out new code to Mac beta users allowing them access to bookmark sync and browser extensions, just over a month after these features made it to the dev channel.

Chrome 5.0.307.7 brings many new features to Mac, and also included updates for Linux users.

Mac users now have access to these new features:

• Extensions
• Bookmark sync
• Bookmark manager
• Cookie manager
• Task manager

The team have also worked hard to ensure the browser is more stable, while having better support for plug-ins like Adobe Flash Player.

The new updated will be pushed out to existing users, or can be downloaded using the links below:

• Windows: http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?extra=betachannel
• Mac: http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=mac
• Linux: http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux

Private browsing will now extend to the Flash plug-in with Flash Player 10.1 Adobe have announced.

“Integrating with your web browser, Flash Player 10.1 will automatically clear stored data in accordance with your browser’s private browsing settings” said Adobe Engineer Jimson Xu.

Flash Player 10.1 supports private browsing with Internet Explorer 8+, Mozilla Firefox 3.5+, and Google Chrome 1.0+, with Apple’s Safari 2.0+support coming soon.

Missing from this list is Opera, which has only recently included private browsing in the latest 10.50 alpha release.

Adobe Flash Player 10.1 is currently in Beta and is expected in the first half of this year. Beta 2 can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.

Opera Software plan to preview Opera Mini for iPhone at the 2010 Mobile World Congress.

“We are thrilled to offer journalists and partners an exclusive preview of Opera Mini for iPhone during the year’s biggest mobile event,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder, Opera Software.

“This is a unique opportunity to introduce the fast, feature-rich Opera Mini experience for the iPhone, and to showcase our latest beta releases of Opera Mobile and Opera Mini on other platforms and devices. Opera’s mission is to bring the Web to the world, and by making Opera Mini available on yet another platform, we are one step closer.”

Such an exercise by Opera could be completely pointless, as Apple may deny the browser entry to the App store as it may compete directly with the iPhone’s version of Safari.

“We hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience,” Tetzchner told Reuters.

Opera also plan on showing other versions of their mobile browsers at the Mobile World Congress which is being held between February 15th and 18th in Barcelona.

Mozilla appears to have let it’s guard down, with a Firefox add-on that included a Trojan that could allow remote access to a users PC.

Two add-ons were affected; Master Filer which was infected with a password-stealing Trojan called Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Sothink Web Video Downloader which was infected with a backdoor Trojan called Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose.

Mozilla has issued a statement:

“If a user installs one of these infected add-ons, the trojan would be executed when Firefox starts and the host computer would be infected by the trojan. Uninstalling these add-ons does not remove the trojan from a user’s system. Users with either of these add-ons should uninstall them immediately. Since uninstalling these extensions does not remove the trojan from a user’s system, an antivirus program should be used to scan and remove any infections.”

Mozilla believe only 4,600 people are infected after downloading these add-ons.

How these add-ons made it online is unknown, as Mozilla scans all add-ons for viruses before they are approved. Mozilla now plans on using two different malware detection tools to try and stop this issue from reoccurring in the future.