For some really strange reason, Google Instant (and the interactive Google Doodles) are not available on the Opera browser. The Google Instant search simply doesn’t happen while you’re on any version of Opera. So, if you are an Opera user and have been wondering how to get it working, maybe we can help:

1) While you are on Google’s homepage, ‘Right click’ > ‘Edit site preferences…’.

2) In the window that appears, choose ‘Network’ tab and then in ‘Browser identification’, select ‘Identify as Firefox’. Click OK.

That’s it. You’re done. Google Instant will work as beautifully as in other browsers. Just to make it clear, this is just a temporary fix from our side because the actual problem lies with Google. After Google stops discriminating Opera you can change the setting back to ‘Identify as Opera’.

Ok I am still not sure whether this is authentic or not but it surely is exciting. A video showing the new user interface of the much anticipated Internet Explorer 9 has surfaced the Internet. To believe the video’s description, it is an actual IE9 Beta installation.

Just a few weeks ago, a leaked screenshot of IE9 created stir across the interwebs, specially among Microsoft fans. Now that the official Beta release is just around the corner, one needs a very strong reason to prove this video as fake. Have a look:

Well, what do you think? [src: Softpedia]

Chrome 6 has been released with some great new features like form autofill, Extension Sync, support for WebM videos and (bet you didn’t know this) a built-in PDF viewer! Yes, it does mean a lot to serious professionals. But it’s not enabled by default. So here’s how you get it working:

In the address-bar, type ‘chrome://plugins/‘ and press ‘Enter’.

Here, simply click ‘Enable’ link in the Chrome PDF Viewer entry.

With the new default PDF viewer, it’s now irrelevant to have an Adobe Reader installed on your computer for viewing PDF files online.

It’s not much of a happy news for Firefox fans that Mozilla has decided to remove atleast one (or more) of the promised features from the final version of Firefox 4 scheduled to be released by the end of this year.

Mozilla developers said that in order to meet the deadline, some features planned for Firefox 4 need to be removed. These features include the new account manager which was introduced in April this year, the Inspector, the web-console and some misc features for the Windows platform. However, things may change by a few degrees here or there as the final feature freeze is due next week, September 10 to be precise.

On a happier note, Google Chrome turned 2 today and for a browser that young, it’s ground breaking to evolve to a 17% foot print in market share [Aug 2010]. Moreover, Google released version 6 of the browser today with security fixes and performance boosts. Download Google Chrome 6 now!

Firefox 4 is slowly making its presence more accountable with the latest beta release: Firefox 4 Beta 4. The new iteration has some performance boosts in addition to new features like ‘Panorama’ (formerly known as TabCandy) and native support to ‘Sync’. We have two videos showing each of the these main features.

Firefox 4 Native Sync:

Firefox 4 Panorama:

[If you can't see the videos above, upgrade to the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari]

We can expect atleast two more beta iterations before the final product which will incorporate the ‘Two tiered Firefox Menu’ along with other exciting features.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 4 (This is a time-sensitive link. The target page may change over time.)

As of now, Microsoft has released 4 ‘platform previews’ of the upcoming browser Internet Explorer 9 that showcased some of the highly anticipated features backed up by super efficient Javascript engine named ‘Chakra’ and latest standards like HTML5 and CSS3. But, until now, major UI elements in those builds were mostly missing. We can suspect Microsoft to unveil it on the day of the first Beta release which is in about 3 weeks from now.

However, Microsoft Russia ‘mistakenly’ posted the interface screens on their press website with some hazy information about the new browser. Although it was taken down immediately, many sites have managed to capture a glimpse of what’s coming:

The interface looks hugely ‘inspired’ by Google Chrome and Firefox 4 with major changes like the absence of the title-bar, integration of address-bar and search-bar, slimmer menu bars, etc. IE9 is also expected to include a feature that will recognize ‘protected’ sites as windows applications which can be moved to the task-bar and can be treated independently.

The performance of the ‘platform previews’ definitely impressed me and it’s only about time Microsoft makes a super ergonomic UI for the browser that holds the greatest share in the market. Is it the dawn of the yet another major browser war? What do you think about the new IE9 interface?

Opera was probably the first to embrace (and innovate) the ‘speed dial’ feature that we now see in Google Chrome and Safari, giving you 1-click access to your favorite/most-visited sites. Now there are plenty of ways in which your can spice up  Opera ‘Speed Dial’. One such is to add a quick local weather report in one of the speed dial boxes. My.Opera.com user BS-Harau shows a how to do it.

1) Copy this URL below and replace YOURCITY with your preferred city.

http://speeddial.operacesky.net/weather.php?lang=en&area=YOURCITY&top=100&redirect=http://my.opera.com/

2) On the Speed Dial Page, right click on any empty boxes, choose ‘Edit’ and then paste the URL in the text-box. Click OK.

3) To receive updated weather report every 15 minutes, just right-click the speed-dial box again and choose ‘Reload Every‘ > ‘15 minutes‘.

For more tips and tricks, click here.

Google and privacy issues go hand in hand. Even Google admits it. And people like you and me are getting increasingly cautious about our privacies online. And we should be. Internet privacy tools have become the talk of the day and if you are using Firefox or Google Chrome, here’s something new to keep you notified when you are being watched by Google’s corporate evil eye.

Google Alarm, is a tiny add-on for Firefox and Chrome that shows an alert message (with an optional alarm ring) as and when you stumble on a site where Google lurks in the form of scripts. Obviously, it includes all Google sites as well. The add-on does nothing fancy and will never come in your way but it’s more like James Patterson saying “you’ve-been-warned”.

I kind of liked this add-on as it specifically tells me what scripts are monitoring my actions. There are 4 versions of Google Alarm, two for each browser, one with alarm ringer and one without it. Check it out.

Download Google Alarm for Firefox and Chrome

Yesterday we put a status update on our Facebook Fanpage about the official availability of Firefox 4 Beta 2. [That’s why you should join us on Facebook, because we keep it updated with the latest of the trends]. Apart from lots of under-the-hood improvements over Beta 1, the Firefox 4 Beta 2 also features App Tab, the small tabs that you always want to keep open. We have a video that explains the functionality of the App Tabs.

If you can’t see the video below, there’s a YouTube version too.

Developments related to tab management in Firefox was going on since several months and now Aza Raskin has finally unveiled Tab Candy, a much needed tab management solution in Firefox. Organising tabs can become a tedious task especially when you regularly deal with 10+ tabs. Owing to the large number of people facing the issue and thanks to several innovative ideas submitted by enthusiasts for Mozilla Labs’ Design Challenge, we now have Tab Candy.

Tab Candy is a visual tab management tool to organize large number of tabs into logical groups for frustration free browsing experience. The following video explains what Tab Candy is all about and features it brings alongwith.

Tab Candy sure looks cool with features like tab group searching, sharing, auto-grouping of tabs, syncing with devices and also the auto-suggestion snippets. However, the Tab Candy project page on Mozilla states that it is yet not decided when the project will be incorporated in the stable builds of Firefox. Nonetheless, you can still try it out in the latest nightly build (Firefox 4 Beta 3).