Opera has just launched Opera 10.1 Beta, the popular browser for smartphones, for Android.

Opera 10.1 Beta for Android brings several improvements to the browser such as pinch zoom, visual tabs, SVG support and Opera Turbo which compresses web data on Opera’s servers, speeding up browsing and saving you bandwidth.

You can grab Opera 10.1 Beta for Android from the Android Market or at http://m.opera.com/next

The browser wars are really starting to heat up, with Internet Explorer 9 beta to go live within a few weeks, Google just releasing Chrome 6, and now Mozilla that released Firefox 4 beta, one can’t but wonder who will take the crown of these next generation browsers.

As Google has done with Chrome, Mozilla has also gone and altered the look of Firefox 4 by moving tabs right to the top of the screen giving it top visual priority and modifying the default navigation icons a bit.

Apart from the changes in looks, Firefox 4 also features synchronization, allowing you to sync all your browser setting, passwords, bookmarks and open tabs across multiple devices. Managing tabs also got allot easier now that Firefox 4 allows you to drag and drop tabs in a manageable group that you can organize, name and arrange.

Under the hood is where it matter most for Firefox 4, the browser now allows you take advantage of your graphical hardware by rendering pages making use of Direct2D by default and with support for DirectX 10. Mozilla also introduced a new Audio API that exposes the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 making it easy for developers to use JS to read and write audio data.

HTML 5 support has also been souped up with a brand new HTML 5 parser giving full support for web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling in Firefox 4. Also support for CSS3 features like Transitions and Transformations makes it easy to add elegant animations to Web pages.

All in all Firefox 4 beta looks set to become a great browser, lets just hope Mozilla has sorted out the high memory usage that made usage of previous versions of their browser unbearable for me. You can grab yourself a copy of Firefox 4 beta here.

Being a web developer I work with different kinds of browsers all the time, and since Google Chrome was released there was no turning back to my previous favourite Firefox. Two years in and Google Chrome still does not disappoint.

Since Google Chrome’s first beta release two years back the browser has come a long way, holding more than 7.5% of the world browser market share. This may not sound like a lot, but if you compare it to browsers like Opera that has been in the market for more than than 10 years and only still hold 2.4%, its clear that Google Chrome is catching up on competitors.

Google Chrome version 6 marks the second anniversary of the Web Browser that is built around speed and simplicity. The new version 6 or Chrome features a built in flash plugin, minor modification to the look, form autofill, and extension and autofill syncronization across computers.

In addition, Google Chrome also kept its support for HTML 5 top notch, making it even more appealing as a browser of choice while keeping it fast, simple and secure.

Just saw that Chris over at iMod did a post about setting up MXit on your iPhone so I decided I might as well do one about setting up mxit on Android seeing that I just got my HTC Hero yesterday.

So for those of you using a Android based phone, here’s how to get MXit on it.

Open up your browser and head on over to http://www.mxit.com/wap

Follow the link to the Android Market where it will show you the MXit download

Choose MXit from the Android Market

Choose install and wait for the notification that it downloaded successfully then open it up.

Thats it folks, now enjoy MXit on your Android based phone.