Mac users can grab the latest beta from the Opera website, the Windows beta 2 release remains, for now, an FTP download.

While the Opera web browser may not have the largest market share, it is the source off many browser innovations. Tabbed browsing got its start in Opera, and the browser was one of the first to broadly support emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS 3.

We took a detailed look at Opera 10.5 when the first beta was released for Windows and found that, aside from some interface design changes, the big news in this release is speed. This is largely due to the inclusion in this release of Opera’s new Carakan JavaScript engine, which boosts the browser’s performance on webapps considerably. Opera 10.5 is noticeably faster than its predecessors and even beat Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome in our informal testing.

The second beta release is primarily a slew of bug fixes and doesn’t offer much in the way of new features. Still, if you’ve been enjoying the first beta, this release should make the experience a little more stable. And now Mac users can get into the party as well, though 10.5 beta 2 is unfortunately only available for Windows users. Mac users are only caught up as far as Opera 10.5 beta 1.

Also worth mentioning is that native HTML5 video is working in both Windows and Mac version of Opera 10.5 beta. Opera joins Firefox as the second browser to go with the Ogg Theora codec for native web video.

See Also:

• Is Opera 10.5 the ‘Fastest Browser on Earth?’ Maybe
• Opera Looks to the Future With Latest Browser Preview
• Opera CTO Sees Open Video Formats as Key to Web’s Future

Google has made the first betas of its Chrome web browser available for Mac and Linux users, the company announced Tuesday.

Here are the links for Mac and Linux. You should download Chrome and begin using it now. These are still betas and not as stable as a final releases, but everyone who lives and works on the web should experience Chrome first hand.

The reason is simple: Chrome is very, very fast. Sickeningly fast, actually. Faster than every other browser not just in page rendering and JavaScript performance, but as a desktop client software app, as well.

For the past two months, I’ve been using Google Chrome as my primary browser on both of my Macintosh computers, an old Mac Mini and a new iMac. Even though it wasn’t officially available for Mac and Linux, Google posted developers’ builds for early adopters to try out. The company warned that they weren’t fully ready — the easiest way to find them was to run a search for “Google Chrome danger” — but in my tests, I found Chrome to have very few problems. More like quirks, actually.

Even as a test app, it has largely replaced Firefox as my go-to browser. It occupies the top slot in my Mac’s Dock, just below the Finder.

The pre-beta Mac version had problems with some text input fields, like the one in WordPress used for composing blog posts. It also had a few issues with the scrollbar causing the video playback window to go blank on some sites. The pre-beta Linux version had fewer problems, but it did exhibit some strange user interface behaviors.

Now, those problems have been ironed out. The Chrome development team has been very cautious about releasing Mac and Linux versions of the browser that are free of bugs and as stable as possible, which is the reason these betas have taken so long. Feeling the pressure, Google made a public promise to release the betas before the end of the year.

I should point out that you need an Intel Mac and OS X 10.5 or later to run the Mac version. The Linux version of Chrome runs in both Gnome and KDE, and it can be installed with most package managers.

Windows users have had official releases for over a year now, allowing Chrome to capture just over five percent of the browser share. Also on Tuesday, Google released an extensions platform for the non-Mac versions of Chrome. This lack of extensions is the one thing keeping a lot of people from switching to Chrome from Firefox, still the preferred browser of most forward-looking web citizens.

So, now that Chrome is widely available and has extensions (official extensions support for the Mac is coming soon, but the daring can enable them now by jumping through some hoops), should Mozilla, Apple and Opera be worried?

They’re all smart companies, so we’re sure they already are. Besides possessing the sex appeal of the “new shiny,” Chrome delivers where every other browser falls short — the promise of extreme speed.

I’ve been using it for everything. Amazon, news websites and blogs, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter, uploading photos to Flickr and Picasa, browsing HD content on Vimeo. Of course, all of the Google apps perform like lightning. Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, Docs and Wave are all so responsive, they almost don’t feel like web apps. With the exception of YouTube, all of Google’s web apps, and most other web apps, perform with almost zero latency.

This is a big advantage for Google. The speed is thanks to the company’s own V8 JavaScript engine, as well as its work on Webkit, the open source page-rendering engine used by Chrome, Safari and a few other small browsers. As with the other modern (non-IE) browsers, Chrome was designed to get as much performance as possible out of cutting-edge web apps, so you get solid support for HTML5, CSS 3 and all the Ajaxy stuff.

Chrome is totally bare bones, making it lean and ultra-responsive. Tabs slide open and closed, and they’re on the top of the window, reducing clutter. Subtle fades and shading effects are applied to the inactive areas of the browser, helping highlight whatever it is you’re looking at.

Chrome’s “Omnibox” is a revelation. It takes the idea of Firefox’s “Awesomebar,” a combination URL bar and a search box for history and bookmarks, and goes one step further. Chrome does away with all other input fields, so if you need any information at all, there’s one place to ask for it. The Omnibox responds to the characters you’re typing, suggesting sites from your history, your favorites and from Google’s suggested search system. Firefox’s interface does the same thing, but it does it with two input fields (Firefox draws revenue from its separate search box, which defaults to Google) and Firefox doesn’t respond as quickly with suggestion.

There are lots of other things Chrome does. It isolates web apps into their own tabs, so a crashing app doesn’t crash the whole browser. It has themes and private browsing, and a thumbnail view of your favorite sites appears when you open a new tab.

Extensions support will remain a sticking point for many users. For everyday browsing, I found I didn’t really miss my extensions that much. And if I did, Firefox was only a mouse gesture away.

Look at it this way. Browsers are free, and they all have their particular strengths, so you should really have at least two.

Firefox is great. It’s fast enough, safe and full of useful features, like a five-seater Volvo or a sporty VW sedan. But when you just want to rip around as fast as you can, you go for the two-seater Porsche.

See also:

• Google Lays the Groundwork for Extensions in Chrome
• Google Shows Off Chrome Themes With Cool YouTube Hack
• Chrome Hits 3.0, Mac Version Due Later This Year

A new version of Transmission, the popular Mac/Linux BitTorrent client, has been released. This is a significant update that adds a new browser-based interface for managing your torrents remotely. The remote features come from Clutch, which has been included with the latest version of Transmission.

The new remote management feature is listed as experimental, but I didn’t have any trouble setting it up and was able to browse and control torrents from other machines on my home network. Firefox 3 didn’t load the stylesheet quite right on my Mac, but the Windows version had no trouble.

The Transmission web interface uses a CSS skin that makes it look indistinguishable from the actual app, so there’s no hunting for menu items in unfamiliar places. All permissions and IP whitelists are handled through the client, but otherwise the web interface has the same basic feature set.

Also new in this version of Transmission is support for Leopard’s Quick Look feature — just select a torrent and hit the spacebar. Of course if most of your torrent downloads are folders or disk images there isn’t much to see in Quick Look, but it’s there if you want it.

As commenters on Lifehacker have pointed out, the ability to serve Clutch out over SSL has been removed. But, as also discussed in the comments, you could set up SSL encryption if you have access to an Apache server you can use as a proxy.

Transmission is free and you can grab the latest Mac and Linux versions from the download page.

See Also:

• Transmission 1.0: Popular BitTorrent Client Gets a Leopard Makeover
• Manage Your BitTorrent Downloads From Anywhere With Clutch
• First Look: Latest Beta Is BitTorrent’s Best Release Yet

Apple has pushed out a series of updates for its iLife ’08 suite with bug fixes and stability improvements for iMovie, iPhoto, iWeb, and more. There aren’t really any new features, though iPhoto does gain some new greeting and postcard themes.

Also updated is iLife Support which handles the integration between the apps and should make things a bit more stable. The only noticeable difference in the new versions is that all menu items related to .Mac support and syncing have been updated to reference the new (awfully named) MobileMe.

Apple fans can grab the updates through Software Update or directly from Apple’s website.

Incidentally, if you’re a Mac user and you’ve been having issues with software or hardware, our own Gadget lab is currently collecting stories. Head on over to leave your own gripes and tales of horror.

See Also:

• Apple Debuts iLife ’08, Revamps and Upgrades Galore
• Apple Updates ILife Suite For Leopard
• Apple Is Giving Away IMovie 6 HD

If you regularly plug in external devices you know all about that frustrating dialog box, “this device is currently in use” which prevents you from ejecting the device. Wouldn’t it be much more helpful if the system told you which files were in use?

That’s the idea behind a clever little Mac donationware app by the name of What’s Keeping Me?. The idea is pretty simple, just type in the name of the device you’re trying to eject and What’s Keeping Me will identify the file or application that’s in use.

What’s Keeping Me then offers you the option to quit, relaunch, or kill the application.

Now it’s true, you can accomplish something similar with Activity Monitor or even the command line option lsof, but What’s Keeping Me offers a very nice graphical interface and makes things much easier.

In a perfect world there would be no need for this app as the Finder’s dialog box would say something useful like: “Can’t eject device X, file [file name] is in use by [app name].” But since we don’t live in that world at least now you have a solution.

If you’re on Windows and looking for something similar, check out UnLocker.

[via Lifehacker]

See Also:

• Deal in a Box: MacHeist Retail Bundle Puts Shareware on Shelves
• Aquamacs Bring Emacs To OS X With Mixed Results
• Portable Mac Apps
• Bento 1.0: FileMaker Launches Glossy Mac Database App

Parallels and VMWare, the two major virtualization options for Mac OS X, have both pushed out some interesting new features in their respect beta releases. Parallels has released a new build with support for Parallels Tools in Linux virtual machines and VMWare has added Mac OS X Server to its list of supported guest operating systems.

It’s worth noting that Parallels Server for Mac already supports Mac OS X Server, but due to the OS X Server licensing restrictions, you could only run a virtual server on a real OS X server. Now that Apple has lifted the licensing restrictions for OS X Server slightly (you still can’t run it on non-Apple hardware), VMWare has jumped in on the fun.

Parallels’ latest salvo in the feature war between these two is support for the Parallels Tools in various Linux distributions (including Ubuntu 8.04). That means the same tools that you use in Windows VMs are now available for your Linux VMs. The Parallels update also includes support for running 3D graphics in your Windows VM on Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3.

Reader often ask which of the two is a better option for virtualization on the Mac. The truth is they’re both great and either one will handle your virtualization needs without difficulty — just make sure you have plenty of RAM installed.

You can grab the latest build of Parallels of the download site and VMWare Fusion 2 beta 1 is available from the VMWare site.

See Also:

• Parallels Updates Desktop For Mac, Makes Windows Integration Even Tighter
• VMware Fusion Update Supports Leopard And DirectX 9
• VMWare Fusion 2 Ups the Ante for Mac Virtualization Software
• Parallels Server: Turn Your XServe into a Virtual Playground

Not all of Apple’s recent announcements are for software of the future, at least one update is here today. QuickTime users can grab the latest edition of QuickTime, which, according to Apple’s notes, “improves application compatibility and addresses security issues.”

The Apple support note for the latest version of QuickTime, 7.5, says that the update fixes bugs that open security holes to maliciously crafted PICT image files, QuickTime files and Indeo video files.

The free QuickTime 7.5 update is available via Software Update or direct from Apple’s download page. The update and security patches affect both the Windows and Mac versions of QuickTime.

See Also:

• Apple Plans Office Invasion With OS X ‘Snow Leopard’
• Quicktime Flaw Makes Windows Vulnerable to Attack
• Apple Updates Quicktime Yet Again

Despite the iPhone-heavy keynote at Apple’s WWDC event yesterday, the company did reveal a handful of details about the next revision of its Mac OS X desktop operating system. As the rumors predicted, the next generation of OS X will be called Snow Leopard and will focus on stability and speed improvements rather than flashy new features.

That doesn’t, however, mean there won’t be new features. Indeed, while details on Snow Leopard are still shrouded in NDA agreements, here’s what we know: Snow Leopard will be optimized for multi-core processors, it will offload some graphics rendering to graphic processing units (GPUs), it enables “breakthrough amounts of RAM” and it will see an updated version of QuickTime, dubbed QuickTime X.

But here’s real doozie, according to Apple’s press release, “Snow Leopard includes out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange 2007.”

Yes you read that right, Apple is bringing the same Exchange support it touted for the new iPhone to the desktop OS, making it much easier to integrate Macs into corporate environments.

It’s as though we’re entering stage two of Steve Jobs’ world domination plan.

First hook the kids with iPods and iPhones, then hook the parents with iChat video, fast web browsing, simple photo management and more. Now it’s time for those maturing kids and their parents to start clamoring for a Mac at work in addition to the one they’re using at home.

Prior to Snow Leopard such cries would likely have fallen on deaf IT ears, but adding in support for Exchange means that corporate IT directors are fast running out of reasons to keep Macs off their list of supported hardware.

While Exchange support and multi-core processor optimizations are indeed new features, it’s easy to see why Apple is touting the next OS X (which incidentally is not necessarily 10.6, nowhere in any of the release materials does the company refer to the release by version number) as a maintenance release. Exchange support isn’t sexy.

Loyal Mac fans will no doubt disagree, but Leopard was a less than stellar release plagued by wifi problems, application incompatibilities and other small, but annoying issues.

So, despite the lack of sexy new features, I for one welcome what Bertrand Serlet, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering, describes as hitting the pause button on new features in order to perfect the existing features.

There’s no release date for Snow Leopard yet, though Apple does say that the release is “scheduled to ship in about a year.” Also unknown are the details about upgrade pricing.

See Also:

• Rumor: New Mac OS X Skipping Features in Favor of Speed and Stability
• iPhone App Store Exclusivity Is a Big Drawback
• Apple Update Delivers Safari 3 and More to Tiger Users

Delicious Library 2, the ultra-slick Mac software that makes it easy to catalog your books, movies and music, is now available. Version 2.0 is a worth successor to the app that spawned a whole category of animation-heavy, eye-candy-saturated Mac applications — often referred to as the Delicious Generation.

But for those unimpressed by visual pizzazz, fear not, Delicious Library 2 packs in the new features as well. Wil Shipley, creator of Delicious Library gave Wired.com a sneak peak of the app when it was still in beta form, be sure to check out our screenshot tour.

Delicious Library’s killer feature remains the ability to hold a book, CD, DVD, video game and nearly anything else with a barcode up to your webcam and get all the relevant data — cover, summary, reviews etc — which displays on a photorealistic shelf. Creating a catalog of you physical media doesn’t get much easier than that.

New features in version 2 include a more robust and faster database back end (an sqlite database replaces the old XML flat file), automatic syncing with iTunes, one-click web publishing, smart shelves, the ability to browse friend’s shelves and more.

Delicious Library 2 also fixes a number of annoyances and offers improved performance for large libraries.

For a full list of what’s new, check out the extensive release notes.

One strange quirk in the new version is the presence of a message which tells you that Delicious Library 2 will run slowly on OS X 10.5.2 and suggests that you upgrade to 10.5.3. In a way it’s a nice touch, but there’s one serious problem — Apple hasn’t actually released 10.5.3.

OS X update quirks aside, Delicious Library 2 packs a punch and will no doubt be a hit with Mac fans. You can grab your copy today from the Delicious Monster site. Delicious Library 2.0 is $40.

See Also:

• First Look: Delicious Library 2.0 Burns With Animated Cool
• Mac App Designers On Leopard: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster

Microsoft recently made its WorldWide Telescope stargazing app available as a public beta, but, unfortunately for Mac users like our friends on the Wired Science blog, it’s a Windows-only app.

But of course you can run Windows on your Mac. WorldWide Telescope likely runs just fine on a dual boot setup using Apple’s BootCamp software, however, it’ll also work using the latest version of VMWare’s Fusion for Mac.

The VMWare team sent us a note yesterday to let us know that Fusion can indeed handle the DirectX requirements of WorldWide Telescope. I tested it out on a copy of Windows XP running in VMWare on my Macbook and, while there is a performance hit, WorldWide Telescope is still plenty snappy even running in a virtual machine.

Of course that isn’t to say that we wouldn’t like to see a native Mac OS X copy of WorldWide Telescope, but at least in the mean time Mac fans can check it out via VMWare Fusion.

It’s also worth noting that VMWare competitor Parallels supports DirectX in virtual machines so it should work as well.

VMWare has even posted a demo video showing WorldWide Telescope in action on a Mac:

See Also:

• Explore Deep Space From Your Desk With WorldWide Telescope
• Space: The Final Google Earth Frontier
• Google Sky Brings the Heavens Online