Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner has made announcement about the availability of Opera 9.5 release candidate 1 (RC 1) for desktops, five days after Mozilla released Firefox 3 RC 2.

The users can easily download Opera 9.5 RC 1 from the Opera Web site.

With anti-phishing and anti-malware technology, Opera 9.5 RC 1 tries to beef up safety.

For example, Opera users will now receive warning messages on visiting hacked Web sites containing Trojans and malicious code as part of the 'Fraud Protection' trait, which draws on the likes of Haute Secure, Netcraft, PhishTank, and Google.

In the meantime, Firefox 3 RC 2 downloads an updated blacklist of malicious Internet sites provided by Stopbadware.org, a group co-founded by Google.

Despite better security, Opera 9.5 RC 1 consists of a new skin for Windows and Mac platforms together with a fix for all POP accounts in order to download email messages.

There’s also a new 'Opera Link' feature in RC 1 that lets easy harmonization of bookmarks among different devices running different Opera editions.