Opera working on Opera Mini Flash replacement

With the release of the Opera Mini Dimension public beta getting closer, we’re getting a little anxious to check out the newest and greatest offering from Opera. We love their lightweight and feature-packed browsers that take mobile web browsing to new levels - which is why we were so excited to hear about Opera working on a fresh new replacement for Flash on mobiles. ARS Technica is reporting that Opera is working on a replacement for the cumbersome Flash plug-in that has been championed by Adobe.

With the new Flash replacement for Opera Mini, you can forget the headache of using proprietary formats and annoying plug-ins to get that embedded Flash video to work on your mobile phone. Opera is basically gunning for content providers that want to streamline video delivery on mobile phones - perfectly suited for an Opera native Flash replacement.

We believe the new Flash replacement project refers to the new initiative, at Opera, to develop a VIDEO element for HTML5. The project is based around the Ogg Theora platform (an open video codec) and is meant for Opera Mini (Opera Mobile is already good on the Flash-front). There is no mention of whether the Opera Mini Dimension beta will be implementing the new Ogg Theora-based Flash format, but we’re fairly certain that it will not. Still, implementation of the new format within Opera Mini is reported to require a slightly larger 300KB footprint - which is believed to get smaller with further streamlining and optimization. So, could we see this in the final version of Dimension? Maybe a Dimension update? We’ll see…

[Via: ARS Technica]