The latest version of the Opera browser was released yesterday, bringing the software to version 10.60. As well as the promise of a 50 percent speed boost over Opera 10.5 in rendering JavaScript - important for sites such as Facebook and Gmail - the release adds support for a number of HTML5 features, as well as support for the Google-backed WebM video standard.

The addition of the HTML5 features, including geolocation and web app caching, simply brings Opera in line with the feature set that Chrome and Firefox are already offering. However, support for WebM in a stable release is a first in the browser market, though it is included in developer builds of Chrome and Firefox.

WebM is the ‘royalty-free’ and open-source web video container announced at the Google I/O conference in May. The creators of the format feel that the use of VP8 codec for video and Vorbis for audio will create an open and compatible container that requires minimal system resources to decode. Backed by Google and already being trialled at YouTube, the search giant has WebM pegged to take over from Flash and HTML5 as the future of internet video.

The browser is available now from Opera's website for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Incidentally, this is the first stable release of Opera for Linux operating systems for some time. Along with all of the 10.60 features, Linux users will be treated to all the benefits of Opera 10.5, including a new and significantly faster JavaScript engine, as well.