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Apparently the people at Microsoft has announced that the first final release of Internet Explorer 7 will be out sometime this month and will be released as one of those automatic critical updates that can be downloaded on “Patch Tuesday”. There’s some speculation that this could be as early as tomorrow.

So, if you’re not careful and not prepared, you may find Internet Explorer 7 on your computer by the end of the week without knowing how it got there.

The current rumor mill about IE7 is that it significantly more secure than IE6, and this was more or less the focus of the IE development team. While a fair amount of CSS bugs are fixed and CSS 2 features missing, apparently there are still plenty of old annoying bugs still around.

A stable release of Opera 9 just came out today. Opera is a great browser that holds its own well against Firefox and certainly beats IE. Opera has been free and ad-free for some time now, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t download it and give it a chance.

Stalking people on the internet is easy, but one man saw fit to make it even easier. Presenting, Stalkerati!

Someone came up with a way to install IE 7 beta without it intruding on your IE 6. Brilliant. Now I can check it out.

Opera 9 Beta has been out for a little while now. Even though Opera is not as popular as IE or even Firefox, it is probably the real leader in web browsing innovation. Opera was the first browser to introduce the concept of tabbed browsing and mouse gestures. The trend now continues as Opera 9 is the first browser to have a built in BitTorrent client in the download manager! And now that Opera is without ads, there is no longer any good excuse to not download it and try it out.

Internet Explorer 7 Beta 2 has also been announced. Rumors are that it has significant improvements with rendering CSS and following standards and, of course, it comes with a host of new features including native tabbed-browsing and increased security. If what they say is true, then it’ll be a much nicer world out there for web developers if IE users upgrade quickly. No doubt the beta will simply overwrite the IE 6 that is embedded in your Windows, so download it only if you’re willing to deal with using beta software instead of stable software as opposed to having a choice.