So Microsoft is going to charge $1.50 (USD) for Office beta downloads. Here's what CNet had to report on the new item.

Wondering what’s new? Changelog for Opera 9.01.

I can’t say that I’ve been personally effected by any of these issues, but the x.01 release generally means that any particularly hairy bugs have been worked out.

Download Opera at the usual place.

Once in the same way most people probably were, wondering: “Why are they talking about Opera 10 already, didn’t 9 just come out?”

Secondly, I was amazed because CNet actually managed to put together an article (341 words) without mentioning Firefox.

Surely someone will be getting sacked later.

Give up?

Answer: The most recent catalog from Dell.

Opera 9 changed the way that it saves passwords, or, more accurately, changed the User Interface.

The new change annoys me. But as much as I might hate it — and I do, like sitting on a dull throbbing tack which randomly heats until I smell my own flesh start to burn — that isn’t enough to make it a bad change, or a good one.

I’m not saying this because I think it’s a bad review of Opera (it is) but because it is a bad review of all 3 browsers. How bad? If this review was a high school report I would give the reviewer an “F” and send a note home for a parent teacher conference and possibly a drug test.

Folks who know me well know that my biggest complaint about using MacOpera (compared to WinOpera) is that all of the installations of Opera will share the same preferences.

WinOpera users can install separate versions of Opera and have completely separate preferences, which is a huge boon for beta testing, especially because you can have more than one version of Opera running at the same time.

A MacOpera using friend recently directed my attention to rooSwitch, a $15 utility which basically allows you to have an unlimited number of profiles for the various Mac apps that you use.

I’ve been an Opera Lover on Windows (1) for many years, and MacOpera for over 2 years, but it’s nice to know that it’s getting some Linux Love too....

Footnotes:

1. Clearly I’m talking about loving Opera on Windows, not loving Windows itself, which I leave to Ballmer, since I’ve never met anyone else who claims to love Windows. They tolerate it. ↩

You can Check your Flash installation here.

For the record, I still find most of the Flash I see online as useless and annoying, but some stuff is good. YouTube can easily kill an afternoon, although I still think it as more proof that if you give a million monkeys the Internet, you won’t get Shakespeare (or, in YouTube’s case... Spielberg... you might get closer to Sandler...)

The Opera web browser has come a very long way over the years. Not only do they render webpages faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer, it seems that they are choosing to stick to the Web Standards world and take the same approach to webpages as Firefox.

...

...[For] those of us who use PCs everyday and have been doing so for many years, Opera does present some very unique options. And with that comes the real question: Will I consider dropping Firefox for Opera? In a short answer, perhaps. It is something that I am willing to explore.

(You can Read the full review at OSWeekly)

While some (myself included) would point out that Firefox is actually taking the same approach to webpages as Opera has (for years before Firefox was even a glint in the pocket of those who are making big bucks off of it), the review touches on some good elements. It is fairly light reading (and spread out over 4 pages instead of what could be 1 not-too-long page) but anytime someone recognizes that Opera is not just another browser, it’s worth pointing out.

This dialog looks the same as previous versions, but the underlying functionality has changed completely.

Answer: Using a Folder Action, you can automatically move files from your Temporary Downloads folder to your default downloads folder.

All The Lovely Browsers! (Published May 30th, 2006)

I’ve said it time and time again, but now someone else has raised the question: How Much Is That Browser in the Windows OS?:

Just how many hours of productivity have been lost to making Web page code work inside of Internet Explorer? Personally, I know that I’ve spent the equivalent of hundreds of man hours coaxing standards-compliant code to render properly in the I.E. world view, and the companies I’ve worked for have probably logged tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of man hours doing the same. When you add up all the effort similarly expended by designers, studios and corporations of all kinds all over the world and over the past five or ten years, it’s got to be an enormously expensive number; if you were to assign hourly rates to all that time, it might total in the billions of dollars.

Safari may not be free (it only comes with the latest version of Mac OS X) but at least you don’t have to spend hours retrofitting your compliant site to work in Safari.