While Firefox 3.0 Release Candidate 1 and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 are not even on the horizon, Opera has moved ahead with Beta 2. Opera 9.5 Beta 2 comes with the following builds: 9945 for Windows, 4789 for Mac and 1933 for UNIX (Linux). The build was announced as early as the past week by Adam Minchinton, Opera Mac Developer. At that time, Opera was gearing up to make Kestrel Beta 2 available.

"Introduced in this build is a new fraud protection back-end. It's better, more reliable and allows us to block malicious sites more quickly than ever before. Fraud protection is now enabled by default," Minchinton explained at that time, as the latest development milestones of the product were released, with the warning that severe issues were inherent to the release, from crashes to data loss.

Huib Kleinhout, Desktop Team manager, revealed that as of April 24, the Beta 2 bits of Opera 9.5 are up for grabs. "Beta 2 introduces Notes syncing support using Opera Link, EV certificate support, improved Fraud protection, many performance and usability improvements in Quick Find (also known as history search), improvements in website rendering and performance, plugin support and of course lots of bug fixes," Kleinhout stated.

One new feature introduced by the Beta 2 build of Opera 9.5 is the integration of Quick Find keyword search into the address bar. Starting with beta 2, Opera 9.5 users will be able to easily navigate to an already visited URL, not by combing the history, but by searching for keywords in the browser's address field.

Opera's rivals, Microsoft and Mozilla, are also building the next generation versions of their own browsers. Mozilla is in the final stages of cooking of Firefox 3.0, expected by the end of June 2008, with Release Candidate 1 as the next stage in the development. And Microsoft has Internet Explorer 8 in the oven, with Beta 1 released on March 5, and with Beta 2 planned for the summer of 2008.

Opera 9.5 Beta 2 Build 9945 for Windows is available for download here.
Opera 9.5 Beta 2 Build 4789 for Mac is available for download here.
Opera 9.5 Beta 2 Build 1933 for Linux is available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 1 can be grabbed here.
Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 is up for grabs via this link.