Opera software has released the newest version of its flagship Opera web browser. Opera 10.6 brings more speed, some bug fixes, support for more HTML5 elements, and it now includes AVG’s Web Threat Data Feed to help protect you against malicious websites.
To try out the latest version of Opera, head over to the downloads page, or, if you’ve been testing the beta, just head to the “Check for Updates” menu item.
Opera 10.6 also supports the new WebM video codec. WebM is a set of codecs (coder-decoders) for browsers to use to play video and audio content embedded on HTML5 web pages without the use of plug-ins. Unlike H.264, a competing codec, WebM is royalty-free and is now supported by all major web browsers except Apple’s Safari.
One new feature that was not in the beta we tested earlier is the AVG malware protection. Opera has long featured fraud protection based on data from Netcraft and PhishTank. Opera 10.6 adds AVG data to that list to help block sites known to host malware attacks, rootkits and other common attacks. AVG’s data feed is a real-time feed of malicious URLs, so you get to hear about new threats as they’re reported into AVG’s system.
While the added defense against suspicious sites is a nice extra, what most users will probably notice is how much faster the browser is. Opera claims a 50 percent speed increase over 10.5, which was already a very fast browser.
Opera’s Carakan rendering engine and the new Vega graphics engine in Opera 10.5 put it neck and neck Google Chrome in our informal tests. This time around we tested Opera 10.6 against Chrome 6 (a developer channel release) and found that the difference is slight, but Opera feels marginally faster.
Of course, at some point, speed tests become an exercise in splitting hairs. Suffice it to say that if speed is what you’re looking for above all else, Opera and Chrome are the browsers for you.
If you’d like to try Opera 10.6 for yourself, head on over to the downloads page and grab the update.
Opera is faster than a potato and getting even faster. Opera has released a new build of the coming Opera 10.6, with more support for various HTML5 elements, bug fixes and speed improvements.
Currently Opera 10.6 is still in the experimental stage so you may experience some hiccups, but if you’d like to test the new features you can download 10.6 from the Opera site.
The big news in this release are the new HTML5 features. Opera 10.6 adds support for web workers, the geolocation API, the offline API and improved support for the Cross-Document Messaging spec.
Opera 10.6 also joins experimental builds of Firefox and Chrome in supporting the new WebM video format. WebM is a set of codecs (coder-decoders) for browsers to use to play video and audio content embedded on HTML5 web pages without the use of plug-ins. Unlike H.264, a competing codec, WebM is royalty-free and is now supported by all major web browsers except Apple’s Safari.
Of course the new HTML5 features in Opera 10.6 are still works in progress. There are bugs. For example, while Opera’s WebM video demo worked just fine in our testing, some WebM videos on YouTube would pause when we right-clicked the page. But the audio didn’t pause, which caused syncing problems. Look for the bugs to be worked out as Opera 10.6 progresses toward a final release.
As for speed, well, Opera’s Carakan rendering engine and the new Vega graphics engine in Opera 10.5 put it neck and neck Google Chrome in our informal tests. This time around we tested Opera 10.6 against Chrome 6 (a developer channel release) and found that the difference is slight, but Opera feels marginally faster (when the Opera 10.6 alpha was released Download Squad found Opera handily beating Chrome 6 in benchmark tests).
So far there’s no release date for the final version of Opera 10.6, but if you’d like to test the latest and greatest Norway has to offer, head on over the download page.
Mozilla has officially added WebM video support to the nightly builds of Firefox. WebM video support will also be a part of Firefox 4, the next version of the popular browser which will be released later this year.
WebM is the new media format launched by Google, Mozilla and Opera at the Google I/O developer conference in May. WebM is a format for audio and video playback in web browsers, media players and hardware devices that anyone can freely implement. It’s seen as the primary competitor to H.264, which is currently the dominant format for video on the web. H.264 is supported by Flash, the iPhone and iPad, and by most browsers, but some are reluctant to support it because of commercial licensing requirements.
Experimental WebM-enabled builds of Firefox were first made available shortly after Google announced it was releasing the VP8 video codec — one of the central pieces of technology for WebM — under an open, royalty-free license. But WebM support is now officially part of the Firefox trunk, meaning native support will almost certainly be included in Firefox 4 when it’s released later this year.
The new WebM support in Firefox comes on the heels of Google’s decision to change the license governing the format. When the WebM Project was first launched last month, the code was released under a custom Google license. Google’s custom license contained clauses that seem to make it incompatible with the GPL, one of the most widely used software licenses in the open source community.
To help spread the adoption of WebM, Google has changed the WebM licensing to use the BSD license, which is compatible with almost every other open source license. The BSD license means that Mozilla can now include WebM’s VP8 codec in Firefox. This also makes it much easier for Mozilla to argue that VP8 should become the officially recommended codec in the HTML5 specification. The HTML5 spec currently doesn’t recommend any single codec for video or audio.
While the Firefox nightlies support WebM, they don’t support all of its features. And of course, these are nightly builds, so expect some bugs and crashes if you’re testing them. Still, if you’d like to test the new codec, head over to the Mozilla FTP site and grab a WebM-enabled nightly build. Then go to YouTube and make sure you’ve opted in to the HTML5 experiment on the site. YouTube is currently offering this experimental site as a way to watch videos using native HTML5 playback in the browser. Everyone else still sees Flash videos.
Once you’re ready to go, just append &webm=1 to the end of your YouTube search URL to search for WebM videos. Here’s a link the WebM Coraline trailer shown above.
In our testing, WebM performed on par with H.264 on a MacBook Pro and on a Mac Pro running Windows 7, though it still heavily taxed our EeePC netbook. Of course, H.264 video fares no better on the netbook. If you were hoping for smooth, crisp HD HTML5 video on low-end machines, well, we’re here to destroy that hope. Maybe the performance will improve as the codec is further developed.
Still, WebM looks great and is significantly smoother than Flash, even on the netbook. While the Firefox nightly builds lack support for features like full-screen mode or the “buffered” attribute, the early release looks promising and the video quality is excellent.
If nightly builds aren’t your cup of tea, fear not — WebM support will be baked into the first Firefox 4 beta, due before the end of June.
SAN FRANCISCO — When Google announced it would be releasing the VP8 video codec under an open source license, all of the major browser vendors jumped up to support it.
Well, all of them except Apple.
The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without resorting to patent-laden technologies.
Watchers of the open web have been waiting for this development for some time. The HTML5 video playback experience varies greatly between browsers, with different browsers supporting different flavors of video, creating a poor user experience and forcing developers to rely heavily on plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. Google was widely expected to take a step towards solving the video problem on the web with Wednesday’s WebM announcement.
Indeed, within minutes of the project’s launch here at Google I/O, links went up to new versions of Firefox and Opera with built-in support for WebM video. Chrome support will be coming in the next beta, due later this month. Microsoft says that Microsoft Internet Explorer 9, due to arrive as soon as the end of 2010, will support VP8 video playback if a user has installed the free codec on their copy of Windows. Adobe says Flash Player will also support it as soon as possible. Executives from Mozilla, Opera and Adobe were all on stage during Wednesday morning’s keynote to pledge their support.
But nobody from Apple appeared, and as of Wednesday afternoon, the company has made no such announcement about support for WebM video in Safari. When asked to comment on this story, Apple didn’t respond.
Of course, Apple has a great deal of time and money invested in a competing technology, H.264. Its Quicktime ecosystem is built on H.264, and it uses the video format for all of its content served through iTunes. It’s also the native format on iPads, iPhones and iPods.
Most video on the web — approximately two-thirds of it — is served in the H.264 format, but various licensing requirements make some nervous to use it. Apple owns patents around H.264 and benefits from the licensing fees that allow its use (so does Microsoft, and many other companies).
So, will Apple begin supporting a open source video codec that competes for space on the web with H.264?
“Stranger things have happened, but I’d be surprised if that happened soon,” says Christopher “Monty” Montgomery, creator of the Ogg container, an open source video and audio technology integral to the new WebM Project, in an e-mail to Webmonkey.
Apple has sent not-so-subtle threats about possible patent violation complaints being brought against supporters of open video codecs. In an e-mail to a blogger, Jobs warned that MPEG-LA, the licensing group that oversees H.264, was assembling a patent portfolio to “go after” open video codec makers.
“Unfortunately, just because something is open source, it doesn’t mean or guarantee that it doesn’t infringe on others patents,” Jobs wrote.
But Monty isn’t worried about the MPEG-LA suing him or anyone at the WebM Project.
“The recent saber-rattling by Jobs felt more like a message to his own troops than a warning shot to ours,” he says. “MPEG itself has always has an internal contingent that has pushed hard for royalty-free baselines from MPEG, and the missives about video codecs and patents were probably meant for them, not us.”
Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the company has done “a thorough legal analysis of VP8″ since acquiring it, and remains confident it can release the technology under an open source license without infringing on any patents.
The Safari browser is based on the same WebKit engine as Google Chrome, and the WebKit engine is open source. But codec support is not a component of the rendering engine, so even though Google’s browser supports VP8 and WebM content, it doesn’t provide an instant fix for Safari.
And of course, iPad and iPhone browsers run Safari, so WebM video won’t work on those devices until Apple adds support.
However, it wouldn’t be tough for Apple to implement WebM support. All of the technologies involved have been released under permissive open source licenses, and it’s already been rolled into three major browsers.
“It’s not a technical challenge,” says Google VP of engineering Linus Upson. “If you look at the other browsers that have already implemented VP8, it’s just been a matter of a few weeks.”
Google’s Upson and Pichai both say they hope all web browsers will support WebM’s efforts eventually.
SAN FRANCISCO — The web received a shiny new gift Wednesday morning — a truly open and royalty-free video codec for HTML5 web pages.
The new open media project is called WebM. As expected, the VP8 codec is at the center of WebM. Google acquired the video technology earlier this year, and developers have been itching with anticipation for Google to release VP8 as open source code. Wednesday morning, they got their wish.
“We are fully open-sourcing VP8 under a completely royalty-free license,” Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai announced to the thousands of attendees at the company’s I/O developer conference, taking place here this week.
Google has already added support for the format to Chrome, and on YouTube as part of the site’s ongoing experiment in building an entirely HTML5-powered experience.
WebM is a set of codecs (coder-decoders) for browsers to use to play video and audio content embedded on HTML5 web pages without the use of plug-ins. The project was launched with the backing of Mozilla, Opera and Google. All three browser vendors have already begun building support for it, and Microsoft announced Wednesday that it will support the video technology in Internet Explorer 9, which is due later this year.
Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch was also on stage at Google I/O, and he announced that VP8 and WebM support would be rolled into Flash Player in the near future.
WebM arrives at the height of a great debate about the future of video online. Support is split between several technologies, including two separate technologies for native video playback, and the Flash Player, which some developers are moving away from in favor of open web standards like HTML5.
The primary components of WebM video are the VP8 codec, which is used for video, and the Vorbis codec, which is used for audio. The content is served inside of a Matroska container. Google acquired the video technology company On2 this year, and it has been working on developing VP8 for use in browsers and on hardware devices since the acquisition was approved.
The dominant video codec in use on the web is H.264, which some developers and browser vendors are loathe to use because of patent and licensing restrictions. H.264 patents are handled by the MPEG-LA licensing group, of which Apple and Microsoft are members.
Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Shaver came on stage to praise the new WebM technology, saying “We want to see this in all browsers, on all devices.”
Hakon Lie, CTO of Opera Software, creator of CSS and long-time proponent of open web video, also took the stage and underscored the importance that open, unpatented video technology would make on the web.
“Tim didn’t patent HTML, I didn’t patent CSS and Brendan didn’t patent JavaScript,” he said.
Opera’s ongoing work on WebM, along with the latest browser builds with WebM support, can be found at labs.opera.com.
Homepage photo of Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering for Google: magerleagues/Flickr
Opera software has released the newest version of its flagship Opera web browser. Opera 10.6 brings more speed, some bug fixes, support for more HTML5 elements, and it now includes AVG’s Web Threat Data Feed to help protect you against malicious websites.
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