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Billed as as “the fastest browser on Earth,” which is probably true in that rarified space occupied by the people who dream up and write the fine print that accompanies everything to market, Opera has increased its market share greatly in recent months in part due to better code, and perhaps just a teeny bit of help from the courts and regulators.

Opera Software released Opera 10.6 for Mac, Linux and PC, which includes some tasty performance and standards compliance goodness under the hood.

• Our further-optimized JavaScript engine is over 50 percent faster than in Opera 10.50
• Enhanced support for advanced Web standards such as HTML5 and WebM video is now included
• Opera can prompt you to share your location, making geolocation-supporting websites more useful
• Search suggestions for selected providers help you find results more easily

Whereas it’s good news that Opera 10.6 has enhanced support for HTML5 and WebM, it remains to be seen if its the same or even compatible with what everyone else Apple, Google and Mozilla are doing. That is, fragmentation is bad and plays into the hands of evil Adobe, which would love it everyone’s still using frickin’ Flash next year.

Get your copy of Opera 10.6 here (14.7MB).

More software news:

— Apple offers updated HP, Epson printer drivers
— Acrobat, Reader 9.3.3 patch zero-day exploit [u]
— Firefox 3.6.6 tweaks crash protector, saves FarmVille
— RipIt 1.5 adds Handbrake CLI compression support
— VLC Player 1.1.1: No GPU decoding for us [yet]