According to About.com

Mar 3, 2010 16:05 GMT  ·  By

Opera 10.x is the surprising no. 1 choice in terms of users preferences as the Best Major Desktop Browser in a survey performed by About.com at the start of this year. Over 50,000 people voted in the Reader's Choice Awards on a variety of topics including Best Major Desktop Browser, Best Mobile Browser, Best Overall Add-On (Non Security), Best Privacy/Security Add-On, Best Independent Browser, Best Browser Theme, and Best User Script. No less than 25,000 votes were casted in order to determine the winner in the Best Major Desktop Browser.

Opera 10.x was selected as the top choice by no less of 51% of users, totaling 13,234 votes. Runner up is Firefox with versions 3.5 and 3.6, preferred by 41% of those surveyed, and which gathered 10,710 votes. Google’s open source browser Chrome is third on the list, with 1,266 votes, 4% of the users that voted. It should, of course, come to no surprise that Internet Explorer 8 is getting less love than it actually deserved. Only 1% of those surveyed chose IE8 as the best desktop browser with 447 votes. Apple’s Safari closes the list with just 234 votes.

Microsoft has been losing its grip of the browser market despite the release of the more web standards friendly Internet Explorer 8, approximately a year ago. However, the company is hard at work building Internet Explorer 9, a preview of which was delivered at PDC 2009. The Redmond company is currently planning to release additional details on IE9 in mid-March at MIX10.

Earlier this week, Opera Software launched the most recent version of its browser, Opera 10.50. For the time being Opera 10.50 Final is available exclusively for Windows users, with the Mac OS X and Linux builds still in the making. The Norwegian browser maker claims that Opera 10.50 is the fastest browser on Windows currently available worldwide.

Google released the Stable variant of v4.0 recently, and is currently focusing both on a minor and a major future release, v4.1 and 5 respectively. In fact, the Mountain View-based search giant offered a beta version of Chrome 4.1 sporting features initially planned for v5.

Mozilla is also pressing onward with the development of its own open source browser, having released Firefox 3.7 Alpha 2/ Mozilla Developer Preview of Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 yesterday. Gecko 1.9.3 Alpha 2 offers new features including hardware acceleration and Out of Process Plugins.

Opera 10.50 is available for download here

Firefox 3.6 Final for Windows is available for download here.

Google Chrome 4.0 Stable is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).