Opera is well-known for their Mobile browsers, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. Lately, Opera has been working hard on their desktop browser and is currently claiming to be the fastest browser on the planet, courtesy of its new Carakan Javascript Engine.
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The Opera Desktop Team has been coming out with one or more builds every week for testing and has finally released Opera 10.60 Beta today. This new release mostly focuses on WebM, Geolocation, Web Workers, Offline Web Applications and Cross-Document Messaging update.
WebM is an open source video format designed to provide royalty free high quality video compression in an open format for use with HTML5 video. Simply put, with the help of this, the browsers that support this capability can play videos without the use of any plugins like Adobe Flash. The project’s development is sponsored by Google. Currently, Opera and Firefox support the Ogg Theora video codec, while Apple Safari supports the H.264 codec. Google Chrome supports both, while Microsoft have announced support for H.264 in IE9. This is already supported in Firefox Nightly builds and Google Chrome.
Geolocation refers to the use of scripts within the browser to determine where the particular user is. Web Applications will use this feature of the browsers, which can lead to countless advantages. For example, a Web service could provide you with information about the nearest hospital, with turn-by-turn route navigation info or maybe a web application can tell you about all the cool meetups happening in your area in the coming days, along with exact locations. The browsers that support Geolocation determine user locations based on a combination of data from users’ wifi access points and users’ IP addresses. Of course, the users have a choice of whether they wish to reveal such information with the sites they visit, as shown below.
Web Workers provide a simple means for web content to run scripts in background threads. This allows for long-running scripts that are not interrupted by scripts that respond to clicks or other user interactions, and allows long tasks to be executed without yielding to keep the page responsive.
Users wanting to try out Opera 10.6 Beta can download it from Opera’s site.