Opera software has released Opera 10.52 for Mac OS X. The latest version of Opera’s flagship browser brings some speed boosts, more HTML5 support and much tighter integration with the Mac platform.

Mac users can grab the latest release from the Opera website.

While the Opera web browser may not have the largest market share, it is the source off many browser innovations. Tabbed browsing got its start in Opera, and the browser was one of the first to broadly support emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS 3.

The new Mac version features a revamped interface that makes Opera look and feel almost like something Apple would have created. In fact, aside from Apple’s Safari, Opera 10.52 is the most Mac-like of the web browsers available on OS X.

The changes — which include using the Cocoa and Core Text frameworks — also offer some performance improvements. Opera 10.5 was already one of the fastest browsers available and the new update continues to best both Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome in our informal page load tests.

This update is also notable for supporting the multi-touch trackpad gestures available in Apple’s more recent laptops. In Opera 10.52 you can use gestures like pinch to zoom and three finger swipes to navigate back and forth in your browser history (both Safari and Firefox support the same gestures).

Opera 10.52 for Mac features a number of smaller enhancements that make day-to-day browsing a bit nicer. The URL bar’s search capabilities have been improved and you can now search your bookmarks and history page as you type — much like the Firefox “awesome bar,” and Opera’s page dialogs and alerts are now considerably less intrusive.

While Opera 10.52 is relatively minor update, it’s worth the upgrade for Mac fans — particularly those looking for a more “Mac-like” experience. To get Opera 10.62, head over to the Opera downloads page.

See Also:

• Opera Updates 10.5 Beta for Windows, Adds Mac Support
• Is Opera 10.5 the ‘Fastest Browser on Earth?’ Maybe
• Opera Looks to the Future With Latest Browser Preview
• Opera CTO Sees Open Video Formats as Key to Web’s Future

Google’s Chrome browser plans to jump on the Web Open Font Format bandwagon. A note in the Chromium project’s bug tracker says that “it appears that we have decided to implement WOFF in Chromium.” Work on adding WOFF support to Chromium is already underway, though there’s no timetable for when the new features will make it into a shipping version of Google Chrome.

The WOFF was conceived by Mozilla as an easier way for web designers to include fonts in their designs. The idea is to let web authors include WOFF fonts in their page designs by linking to the font files in their code the same way they link to images and other downloadable files.

WOFF attempts to address some of the problems with CSS 3’s @font-face rule, which allows for downloadable fonts, but says nothing about the format of the fonts. As we’ve noted before, using @font-face can lead to radically different results in different browsers. Last year popular website Boing Boing launched a redesign using CSS3’s @font-face rule, but ran into problems when things didn’t render correctly on older machines.

Another concern is page load times. Because WOFF has built-in compression, adding extra WOFF fonts to your pages shouldn’t slow them down as much as a traditional OpenType or TrueType font file.

Since WOFF support was added to Firefox (in version 3.6), Opera and Microsoft have both pledged their support and the format has been submitted to the W3C for consideration as a standard.

The IE9 beta doesn’t yet support WOFF, but Microsoft is an official sponsor of the W3C proposal and the IEBlog has written about WOFF so we hope to see WOFF support before IE9 is finished.

With Google Chrome onboard, Apple’s Safari may soon be the only currently shipping browser without WOFF support.

Perhaps even more important than browser support is the fact that font foundries are getting behind the new spec. WOFF fonts aren’t secure, so the format won’t be used by foundries wanting to regulate the use of their work. However, over 30 major type foundries — including Adobe, House Industries, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and ITC, LinoType — are already endorsing the format.

While WOFF doesn’t solve all the problems of web fonts, it’s a huge step in the right direction. With Firefox, Opera, IE and now Chrome all supporting WOFF, designers may soon be able to add just about any font to any webpage.

If you’d like to know more about WOFF, plus see examples of its use, head over to the original announcement on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

See Also:

• Mozilla Throws Its Weight Behind Improving Web Type, Adopts WOFF for Firefox
• Boing Boing’s Redesign Uncovers the Dark Side of Web Fonts
• Review: Typekit Delivers Custom Web Fonts to the Masses
• Typekit Hopes to Become the YouTube of Fonts

SAN FRANCISCO — As we predicted, Facebook is switching to an open standard to handle user authentication across its entire platform of connected websites and applications.

Facebook is ditching its proprietary Facebook Connect system, which lets people use their Facebook username and password to log in to other sites around the web. In its place, the company will implement OAuth 2.0, an open source (and soon to be IETF standard) protocol for user authentication.

Viewed along side the barrage of other major announcements unleashed by Facebook at its F8 developer conference here on Wednesday, the move may only seem like a minor data point. But it is one with the potential to make a broad and deeply significant impact on the social web.

Right now, users expect three choices for logging in to a site with an existing ID: Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID. That forces publishers to implement three separate systems — one for OpenID, one for Twitter, which uses OAuth, and one for Facebook, which uses Facebook Connect. But once OAuth 2.0 is up to speed and more sites move over to it, things get simpler for site owners.

Where there used to be three options — Facebook Connect, OAuth and OpenID — there will now only be two. And the two that are left are both open source.

There are still details involving token management, auto-registration and other bits of complex backend plumbing to be sorted out, that Wednesday’s events don’t change.

But the move towards OAuth is a step towards interoperability the social web sorely needs. Most importantly, it will be easier to build pathways connecting OAuth and OpenID, since both are fully transparent, open standards and the proprietary Facebook Connect system has been removed from the equation. The switch paves the way for further integrations between existing technologies.

During a panel discussion about OAuth on Wednesday afternoon, Facebook engineer Luke Shepard said that by adopting OAuth, he hopes Facebook will “help drive it to become such a core part of the web, all the tools will end up supporting it.”

Twitter also recently began supporting OAuth 2.0 with last week’s launch of @anywhere, its suite of social-interaction tools.

But what about OpenID? It was one of the key technologies responsible for pushing the idea of single sign-on forward, so why isn’t Facebook supporting it yet?

“Developers aren’t asking for OpenID,” Shepard said when the question was posed to the panel. “They’re explicitly asking for us to make logins simpler and easier, not for us to implement OpenID. So now we’re doing that by implementing OAuth 2.0, because it’s simple and easy. Adding OpenID on top of it would just add a layer of complexity nobody is asking for.”

OpenID is indeed very complex, and because of that, it suffers from usability problems that have kept it from being widely adopted.

“It’s very easy to do user authentication over OAuth 2.0,” Shepard said.

Panel moderator David Recordon, who develops open technologies at Facebook, asked the audience of about 60 or 70 people: “How many of you here want Facebook and Twitter to adopt OpenID?”

Five people raised their hands (I was one of them).

Another panelist, Raffi Krikorian from Twitter, quipped, “That answers your question right there.”

Krikorian did offer a ray of hope for OpenID, though, noting that browser makers may provide the missing links that solve OpenID’s complexity problem.

“Since the browser exists in between the web service and the user, it makes perfect sense for the browser to handle those identity-management tasks,” he said. “I think that would be a huge step forward for the web.”

Another panelist, Yahoo’s Allen Tom, another long-time OpenID advocate, agreed that browser makers could definitely help fix OpenID’s UI problems.

“If browsers can eliminate the confusion in the whole authorization flow around OpenID, that would be ideal.”

See Also:

• Up Next For Facebook: Expect More Open Interactions
• Facebook Shows Off New Tools to Socialize the Entire Web
• Facebook Tags Everyone at F8 with RFID Chips