You may recall that the Mozilla Foundation is trying to set a Guinness World Record: the most downloads of software in the first 24 hours of its release. But we had no release date and we received an RC3 on Wednesday.

Opera today made Baidu the default search engine in Opera’s desktop browser in China. Now anyone accessing the Internet using Opera’s Chinese-language desktop browser can immediately enjoy Baidu’s powerful search directly from the browser start page.

Since its arrival in Beijing, China, Opera Software, the world's leading developer of Web browsing solutions, has maintained strong growth momentum in the vibrant market. Opera today announced that Haier, a leading handset manufacturer and popular consumer brand in China, has chosen to pre-install Opera Mini on three new handsets.

Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3.0 has appeared on Mozilla's FTP servers. You'll recall that last week, Mozilla decided that it needed a second RC in order to address bugs found in the RC1 build.

We are all spoiled by browser plug-ins and would much rather use an extension or browser add-in than a stand-alone application that we have to install separately. And that's been my big problem with Google Earth.

Webmaster, you are warned, that Internet Explorer 8 will have its next public release, Beta 2, in Q3. Why the warning? Well, as you recall, Internet Explorer 8 will be standards-compliant, and will be released in that mode by default. Since many web sites are coded to IE's quirks, webmasters will have to add some code to force IE8 into IE7 emulation mode if they want it to render as IE7 did.

One of the strengths of Firefox has been its large assortment of extensions, plug-ins and language packs, which extend its functionality in any number of ways. Internet Explorer has nowhere near the number or variety of add-ons. Of course, if one of them gets compromised.

I assume you know what phishing is, but if you don't, it's basically trying to get sensitive - and particularly financial - information from people by impersonating a trusted entity in an electronic communication, typically an email. Paypal is getting ready to fight this.

All the brouhaha about Apple being aggressive or sneaky... trying to install the Safari browser via Apple Update is hilarious.

There has been a lot of talk over the last few days over Safari 3.1 which is Apple’s web browser. It was released last week to both Mac and PC users via Apple’s Software Update mechanism (which Apple users have as part of OS X and Windows users get when they install an Apple application such as iTunes).

Microsoft announced that it has made IE8 available for beta download from its website.