A new version of the Opera browser has been made available in beta format.

Opera 9.5, currently dubbed Kestrel, includes security improvements, the ability to update bookmark lists automatically, an improved search function, a built-in POP/IMAP email client, and full text searching within History files – making it easy to retrospectively bookmark sites.

Once added bookmarks can be synchronized across a number of different devices, such as PCs, Macs and mobile phones using the Opera Link function. Users that sign up to this feature can also log-in to their bookmarks from any connection.

A fraud prevention feature protects surfers from sites that try to maliciously steal information. A question mark next to a web site's URL can be clicked to open up a dialogue box. The site is then checked out by a third party and is referenced against Opera's blacklist of sites. Once this kind of check has been carried out once, the browser will check each site it comes across. If a site is likely to be fraudulent the user is warned against visiting it.

According to the firms' own benchmarks, Opera is 30 per cent faster than Internet Explorer, and more secure than Mozilla's Firefox