Opera 9.5 developers promise their product will have the most up-to-date network security technology. Haute Secure, a company founded by former Microsoft employees, provided the third most popular Web browser with the necessary network security enhancement tools.

News.com says that Opera's move is a result of keeping up with the technical progress and trying not to fall behind the competitors, like Firefox 3 that will have similar functions and is said to be released at the end of June, 2008. However, their similarity ends where it comes to the way the companies collect data about dangerous Internet resources. Firefox protection is based on Google's and StopBadware's harmful Web site database, while Haute Secure relies on a community of regular users that track dangerous Web sites.

According to testing performed by News.com, Firefox 3 RC2 automatically blocked most recent phishing Web sites, while Haute Secure did not cope with its task. The reason for that was simple: API of the anti-phishing Web sites like PhishTank do not get updated until there is a 100% certainty that a Web site poses any online threat. Meanwhile, Haute Secure successfully blocked access to Web sites containing viruses and trojans able to download themselves via a Web browser to a computer and infect it. Haute Secure also grants users more additional information on those pages than Firefox 3 RC2.

At the moment, Opera 9.5 is in beta, and Version 2 can be downloaded from its usual download page.