Opera Mobile to support Flash and HTML5 on Android

Opera Software has sparked some excitement with the news that its forthcoming Opera Mobile browser for Android will support HTML5 and Adobe's Flash.

The news was posted on the Opera Mobile blog over the weekend by Pavel Studený, one of the company's developers.

Opera Mobile already has all the browser features in place, but the Android version will also support Flash and HTML video, Studený wrote, in order to improve user comfort when surfing.

Opera Mobile 10.1 for Android is still in beta, but the firm made it available as a download early in November.

Studený said that newer technologies aim to replace Flash as a way of delivering video content via the web, but that the format has widespread support and is likely to be around for some time to come.

Opera Mobile will thus support Flash on Android devices, providing the user has Flash installed on their handset.

Adobe has already made available Flash 10.1 for Android devices, but this is supported only in handsets running version 2.2 of Google's platform.

Meanwhile, HTML5 provides direct support for embedding video content into a web page, but does not specify the format.

However, as has been widely reported, browser developers are split on which format to support. Apple and Microsoft favour the H.264 codec, while Mozilla and Opera prefer the royalty-free WebM format.

Opera has yet to announce an official release date for the full Opera Mobile 10.1 for Android.