The gap between Opera and Firefox seems to become bigger and bigger. I have been on and off on Opera, but lately I have been more or less just on. Opera 9.5 gives simply gives the best browsing experience, and now it gives us even more.

In a blog entry the desktop team is explaining why they still are using to different installers for the installation under Windows, as well as giving access to the latest build.

The release is with the latest desktop plus:

  • Video (Ogg Theora) – used by Wikipedia and others. There are HTML5 examples based on working drafts of the HTML 5 specification being developed at W3C, and Erik Dahlström’s video in SVG article. I have been looking in to HTML 5 a bit this spring, and I am not sure that Ogg Theora will be part of it, and I am more or less sure that Opera will loose a battle against Apple and Nokia! Having said that, it’s about time that we get standards for audio and video on the net, that is for me more important then what file formats are chosen. And needless to say, these formats should be open.
  • 3D canvas – is according to Opera the most experimental feature in this build. At least Opera and Mozilla have been thinking about how to provide 3D rendering in a way they can implement cross-platform even on proprietary systems. 3D canvas, like its 2D cousin, gives developers a javascript-based approach.
  • File I/O – yepp, the browser is about to become the operating system. File I/O was originally announced by Opera back in May, and proposed to W3C for development as a standard, and gives you a way to interact with the filesystem from within your application. In this build, Opera has only enabled this feature for widgets, which can now ask the user to enable them to use an area in the filesystem — either to work with their existing content (manage photos that other applications also work on, for example) or a new clean sandbox for storage.
  • eBook widget: Opera is brilliant at supporting standards, and with this widget you can read books published in the Epub format. This is one of the demo widgets released for this new build of the browser, and will not work in regular Opera builds as it needs the File I/O functionality.

And this time Opera is not only coming with a special build for Windows, the build is also available for us Linux and Mac users. Now we can all have a peek at what HTML 5 will bring us. I can hardly wait!