As we enter a new decade, web-apps are shaping up to challenge traditional system dependent applications. Google is possibly at the forefront of this change with its highly anticipated Chrome OS. However, several other players are keen to leverage the benefits offered by web apps. Back in October, Opera joined the Wholesale Applications Community, while Mozilla announced its new Open Web App platform. Now, Opera has released a preview build of its Widget runtime for Android, which is based on the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) 1.0 specification.

WAC is an alliance of the world’s leading mobile operators and OEMs, such as Vodafone, Verizon, AT&T, Samsung, Huawei and others. Its fundamental aim is to promote the use of web technologies to enable developers to write an application which can execute on a web runtime upon multiple mobile device platforms. The benefit of using WAC specification is that the same widget will be able to run on multiple phones, irrespective of the underlying operating system. This makes things easier for both developers and publishers.

The Widgets runtime released by Opera allows you to download and run existing widgets from widgets.opera.com. Opera’s widgets are platform independent, and already work on all popular desktop platforms including Windows, UNIX and Mac. With WAC Runtime, they will now run even on your mobile phones.

WAC 1.0 devices and storefronts are scheduled to launch at the Mobile World Congress 2011.

[ Download Opera Widgets Runtime for Android ]

The other day I went looking for a good weather reporting tool for the Chrome web browser. I remembered using an addon named AniWeather in Firefox and wondered if there was a similar extension for Chrome. I was amazed to find that AniWeather is now available in Google’s Chrome web browser.

Once you have AniWeather set up, you’ll be able to see the current outside temperature in a little icon next to the address bar.

Clicking on the icon displays a very nice looking animated weather report.

You’ll discover that there are tons of options for the display of the weather and it even allows you to set multiple locations. The actual weather data is pulled from the famous weather.com website, and you can use links in the AniWeather report to see more information at weather.com.

You can find this cool extension in the Chrome Extensions Gallery or at the author’s website, AniWeather.com. The Firefox addon is available at the author’s website and the Firefox Addons gallery.

For those of you using Internet Explorer, the closest thing to this extension is the Weather Channel Toolbar. It’s good but not nearly as nice as the Firefox and Chrome addons.

For Opera web browser, there are several widgets that display weather. I haven’t looked closely, but so far I haven’t seen any that display reports inside the browser.

Now you can check the weather while you are surfing the net. The problem you’ll have is pulling yourself away to take advantage of the sunny days.

Be sure to take a look at all of the other Chrome Extensions and Firefox Addons we’ve written about.

Opera is a really good browser and if you are not using it yet, we highly recommend you give it a try, just like Firefox has add-ons , Opera too has a widget system which allows you to add features to the browser.

Here are some of the most useful Opera Widgets for Opera that can add value to the browser.

Don’t Miss: Most Useful Gadgets for Gmail

Image Grep/Search Quickly search for images from various sites including Google, Flickr, Yahoo!, Ask.com and Photobucket, without the need to open a additional browser. Clicking on the thumbnail will directly open the image in a new tab, very useful.

Video Downloader Fancied a video you just watched and want to store it on your PC, the video downloader widget will help you to download videos and store it on your PC from 100s of sites.

Google Translator Quickly translate text between languages, comes in very handy and is a definite time saver.

Google Toolbar (our review) Google Toolbar for Opera brings several of the features available in Google Toolbar to Opera in the form of a widget, you can do most.

To-Do List Manager The dotoo To-do list manager is a handy widget that will allow you to manage your to-do lists from right within Opera. Want more, take a look at the Best Online To-Do list managers and 11 Sticky Notes Applications for your desktop.

Wikipedia Search Quickly searches and displays information from Wikipedia, you can also search for content in Wikipedia using this widget.

Time & Date Calendar This widget will allow you to manage your schedule & events from right within Opera, it also has a option to import events & settings, and import & export iCalendars.

Google Maps Perform location based and local searching using Google maps, find directions and more without having to open a separate tab.

Password Generator Want to sign up for a site and require to create a strong password? This widget allows you to create strong passwords by providing it a phrase.

Temporary Inbox Quickly create a temporary email inbox to register on forums and websites. You may also want to check our extensive list of temporary email services.

Multi Weather Track and view weather updates for multiple locations for any locations across the world.

Flight Tracker & Flight Monitor Real time flight tracker, lookup up-to-date flight arrival & flight departures for any international airlines.

eBay Watcher Watch up to 10 auctions of your favorite products from eBay. You can also try out a desktop applications to track eBay Auctions.

Remember The Milk A widget to track your RTM account using a widget, if you are a RTM user you may also want to check out other apps for desktop access of RTM.

Multi Gmail Accounts If you have multiple Gmail accounts and want to check the emails for all of them this widget will come in pretty handy.

Scientific Calculator & Calculator Widget Perform advanced or basic calculations from right within Opera.

Unit Converter Perform unit conversions between Acceleration, Area, Torque, Electricity, Energy, Force, Force / Length, Length, Light, Mass, Mass Flow, Density & Mass capacity, Power, Pressure & Stress, Temperature, time, Velocity & Speed, Viscosity, Volume & Capacity, Volume Flow.

Currency Converter Convert between different currencies using live data provided by XE.com.

Pandora Radio Widget Allows you to play songs from the Pandora without having to open a full tab.

Quick Skype Calls If you use Skype to make local calls, this handy widget will help you call numbers using Skype, you will have to have Skype installed on your system though.

Sort It Out – Textarea for quick and simple string list operations: Sort, UPPERCASE, lowercase, Capital, letter frequency.

World Clocks Keep an eye on the time in different cities across the world from the browser with this handy widget.

Screen Ruler & Ruler Designers need to be accurate right down to the last pixel, the ruler widget will come in pretty handy to measure things in your browser.

Color Picker Color picker adds a widget that will allow you to choose a color and quickly get the hexadecimal value for it.

What do you think about these widgets? Do you use any other useful widgets that we might have missed? Don’t forget to tell us about your views and the widgets you use.

Here is something Opera and Twitter fans will definitely love, a nice and cool widget for Opera that is simple lightweight and can be used to tweet away when you are browsing or surfing in Opera.

The widget allows you to perform operations like view recent messages, view replies, view direct messages, browse archives, search, find people near you and so on, in addition to that it also has a inbuilt mechanism to shorten URLs you want to share.

In addition to that you can also reply to message, send a DM message to someone and retweet (RT) your friends tweets. Definitely worth using if you are a Opera user.

Download Twitter Widget for Opera

It is pretty much easy to add GTalk to the sidebar in Firefox, but if you are a Opera user there are no widgets available to do that currently.

The WongSK blog has a excellent tutorial that will help you add GTalk to the sidebar panel in Opera. To add GTalk to the Opera sidebar, follow the simple instructions below.

1. Enable Panel view in the Sidebar, you can do this by click the tools icon in the left hand side corner of the browser.
2. Right click the panel and click customize.
3. Click on the Add Web Panelbutton.
4. Give the panel a name and add the GTalk gadget URL ( http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/client?fid=gtalk0&relay=http://www.google.com) as the address and click on Ok button.

Once you have followed these steps, a new icon will be displayed in the panel, clicking on the new icon should display GTalk in Opera sidebar.

Mods Tip From WongSK Blog

The browser war keeps going on with Google Chrome, Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 8 and Opera fighting for our attention, but the fact is that the mere simplicity of the browsers do not make it a ready-made choice, the support for extensions and add-ons are equally important.

Opera does not have support for toolbars by default, but they do support widgets using which you can get the functionality of toolbars. We had previously discussed about getting the StumbleUpon toolbar for Opera, and in this post we will tell you about the different widgets that would bring the functionality of Google Toolbar, Delicious Toolbar and Digg Toolbar to Opera.

Google Toolbar for Opera

The Google Toolbar widget for Opera brings all the Google services to Opera, install the widget and access the missing Google toolbar feature for Opera.

Download Google Toolbar Widget

Delicious Toolbar for Opera

Delicious is one of the most famous social bookmarking system and we definitely missed the ease with we could save URLs to our favorites with toolbars for Firefox and IE, the Del.icio.us Opera buttons brings the same functionality to Opera.

With Del.icio.us Opera buttons you can easily access your delicious bookmarks, inbox and post your favorite URLs to delicious.

Download Delicious Buttons for Opera

StumbleUpon is a great service to discover new site and share it with like minded people. StumbleUpon makes it easier for users to stumble upon or share sites by providing a toolbar to users, unfortunately the toolbar is available for only Firefox and IE users.

Stumbling becomes harder for users who use Opera, since it involves manually loading stumbleupon.com and reviewing the site or giving a thumbs up to it. We shared the same annoyance as other StumbleUpon Opera users faced, since we had to toggle between Opera and Firefox to stumble a site, this led us to search for a tool that would make stumbling from Opera much more easier.

Related: Run Greasemonkey scripts in IE, Opera and Safari

OperaStumbler is a great alternative of the StumbleUpon toolbar for Opera users, they provide you with 4 different ways in which you can use StumbleUpon with Opera;

We prefer using the Menu Version for ease of access and ability to have all the SU toolbar features.

You will require to provide your stumbleupon details before you can start using OperaStumbler, but once you are setup, there is no stopping you from stumbling websites in Opera.