My 2 cents of clipping today ;-)

• Ballmer: Linux Bigger Competitor than Apple;
• Apple released the first beta release of Safari 4.

So people don't think I have abandoned this beloved blog of mine :D
Both links are on my not so active twitter too ;)

I´ve downloaded Opera 8 beta version and for my surprise it has now a plugin that enables the browser to receive a huge set o voice commands and more, it speaks your selected text!
Just click to install, need no browser 'boot', a huge download (almost 10mb) but with a nice dialog window, non modal, showing you a progress bar.
It´s not that robotic voice I´ve seen in the past, but one with a good natural intonation, not perfect at beta I tested since it had some odd pauses when reading hyperlinks. Nevertheless it´s a great feature, what makes me think that the Browser´s War is getting each time harder. I´ve already used it to read for me some Paul Graham´s essays :)

At the time of this post I´ve just opened opera and it told they had already released the final version.

I´ve been a huge opera fan since 2000 when I first met it (the version was 5.6 I think). It had:

• A render engine really fast;
  
• Tabbed browsing, you could drag and drop your tabs, reorder then, etc;
• Themes, simply click the link to install. The BeOS theme I used for years;
• A view highly customizable (hide and change position of almost every toolbar and other visual stuff);
• You could press "g java download" and it would search at google for "Java download" (the feature I most loved with tabbed browsing and the dictionary search through a context menu item). And the same for sites like amazon, a online encyclopedia and others.
• Implement your own style sheet: This feature was terrific, the opera´s site description:

  You can specify your own style sheet and disable the document's style sheet, which will let you view the page with the colors and fonts you prefer...You can switch between the "User mode" or "Author mode" style sheet by pressing Ctrl G, or by clicking the User mode/author mode icon you find on each page.

• Session saving, even for multiple windows. You could have opened 3 windows with seven tabs each and when you closed opera and opened the next day it would open every tab and window the same way you defined. You could also save your sessions in files to open in other computers;
  

Nowadays you can find almost of all this features in Firefox for example. But Opera had all that about 4 years ago.
Today my preferred browser is Firefox which I use since Firebird version 0.6. The first reason I´ve changed to Firefox was its real good renderengine, Opera at that time still had some strange renderings for somepages.
Now and then I still take a look at opera at home, now even more with this speak feature :)

I just hope the browsers war keep giving us each time better features and one day IE can loose it´s monopoly :)