Opera 10.60 Beta supports WebM / VP8

Opera 10.60 Beta on Mac OS X playing a WebM video. The Opera development team have issued a beta for version 10.60 of their cross-platform web browser which features a number of improvements related to HTML5, including support for HTML5 Offline Web Applications.

The Opera browser development preview adds support for the latest open WebM / VP8 video format introduced by Google as part of the WebM Project. Previously, WebM / VP8 support in Opera was only available as an experimental build. A number of other browsers have already added support for WebM / VP8, including Google's developer channel (a.k.a. the Dev channel) version of Chrome and the latest Firefox 4.0 development preview.

Other updates include a major update for Cross-Document Messaging and support for Web Workers and the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Geolocation API Specification. Using the Geolocation API, web applications can determine the user's current position, with their permission, using the World Geodetic System (WGS 84). The Norwegian company has also published an Introduction to HTML5 video on its developer portal for interested users.

As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they encounter.

More details about the beta, including the change log and links to demos, are available in an Opera Desktop Team blog post and on the Opera Next homepage. Opera 10.60 Beta is available to download for windows, Mac OS X and FreeBSD/Linux (direct downloads).

See also:

• WebM project changes to standard open source licence, a report from The H.
• Google open source VP8 as part of the WebM Project, a report from The H.

(crve)