socialrosiechen: Opera 10.6 goes final: fast, WebM support, malware blocking powered by AVG

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Opera 10.6 goes final: fast, WebM support, malware blocking powered by AVG

Filed under: Browsers

We've known for a while that Opera 10.6 was going to be fast -- the Carakan JavaScript engine has kept Opera's performance near the front of the pack since its debut. What we didn't know was that version 10.6 was also going to bolster Opera's malware defenses.

The new malware-fighting abilities are provided by the folks at AVG, and they work well -- notifying me that the site hosting Justin Bieber screensavers was malicious (hey, even if they weren't serving infections that kind of crap should be blocked... ).

If you happen to be a CNet reader as well, you may have noticed Seth Rosenblatt's claim that "The new security feature indicates that while Chrome and Firefox are looking to further isolate plug-ins and add-ons, Opera hopes to address the immediate threat from malware-infected Web sites." Truth be told, both Firefox and Chrome have blocked malicious URLs for some time -- and Chrome has that whole sandbox thing going for it as well.

Unlike Chrome and Firefox, however, Opera displays an offer for a 30% discount from AVG. Which is cool, if you like coupons.

The new version also adds support for Google's WebM video container, making Opera 10.60 the first stable browser to offer support. More HTML5 features are supported as well, including geolocation, Web Works, and App Cache. Yep, Opera's new stable release supports as much HTML5 as some other bleeding-edge browsers.

Opera 10.6 final is now available for download from the official website.