Since Opera released the first alphas and betas for Opera 10.5 beginning last year, they’ve been able to boast of having the speediest browser on the planet. Test after test shows tiny increments of advantage over Google Chrome, Firefox and, of course, Safari. You hardly count Internet Explorer in such benchmarks, since it trails the pack by a such a huge margin.

Now the specifics of those tests aren’t important unless you live your life at a frantic pace where a few milliseconds here or there will somehow impact your earnings potential or your emotional stability.

But that hasn’t stopped the hard-working developers of all those products from working feverishly to unearth even the most miniscule cause of a rendering slowdown, and eradicating it pronto. I mean, just think how all this impacts your Web surfing experience.

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When you run Safari, the search address bar will give you any search engine, so long as it’s Google. With the iPhone, you can select Yahoo! as an alternate. Sure, you might find it only slightly less convenient simply to visit the search engine of your choice, and add it to Safari’s toolbar.

However, as you know, most people tend to stick with the default settings, be it a browser, a search engine or loads of other options on a Mac or a PC. Certainly that works to Google’s advantage, since it holds such a huge share of the market. It doesn’t hurt that we “Google” something rather than search for it. Being a verb pretty much means that Google will own search for the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t give you some alternatives.

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As some of you have heard, the PC industry appears to have recovered from a severe case of the doldrums, reflected in declining sales for part of 2009 mostly as the result of the world economic crisis. There was, however, one shining light in all this grief, aside from Apple’s record profits of course, and that’s the netbook.

So if you felt you just had to squander $300 or $400 on a tiny notebook computer, you were in good company. Indeed, it may well be that it was this product segment rather than the arrival of Windows 7 that impacted the PC industry the most. But is that good news for Microsoft?

Well, I suppose it is if many of those new computers were shipped with Windows, particularly Windows 7. It wasn’t so good if they were supplied with Windows XP, or to add insult to injury, Linux. Later this year, Microsoft’s worst nightmare will be the arrival of Google’s Chrome OS.

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A friend and colleague suggests to me that the reason you have antitrust lawsuits is not to protect the public’s interests, but to give lawyers lots of highly-profitable work. While I understand the need to earn a living, especially in these troubling times, that comment raises the question whether anyone benefits from going after companies that are allegedly abusive.

Just recently, the European Union accepted Microsoft’s ballot box proposal, where customers would be able to easily select and install alternative browsers. That was designed to protect the unwary public in Europe from having Internet Explorer forced down their throats and conclude an antitrust action. While I am certainly in favor of freedom of choice, it does appear the marketplace is already speaking when it comes to browsers.

Consider that Internet Explorer, which once held an over 90% share, is now down to approximately 60% overall without ballot boxes. That means that 40% of Internet surfers have decided to let their fingers do the walking and they have selected Firefox, and in lesser numbers, Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Opera. It doesn’t appear that the tepid updates to Internet Explorer have been able to stem the tide, just as Microsoft’s new Bing search engine hasn’t halted Google’s growth path.

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