Opera's Phillip Grønvold has told TechRadar that the arrival of HTML5 over the next few years is 'immensely critical' for the internet, and will change everything from how long our phone batteries last to how the entire web is structured.
Grønvold, a product analyst for browser specialists Opera, is already looking forward to the final HTML5 standards being set, something that is unlikely to happen for 18 months or so.
HTML5 will allow browsers to utilise the computer's hardware more, using things like graphics processors to speed things up and allowing us to phase out plugins like Flash and JavaFX
Immensely critical
"HTML5 is immensely critical for the web," Grønvold said, "What I want to say is the Opera browser in 18 months is almost unrecognisable from Opera as it is now –bringing speed, performance, usability and true web integration.
"That's not so much that there's not the capability in technology but content and services are catching up to really take advantage of what has really been a static and in general over the last 20 years only interpretable language.
"So the problem of the web it that it is interpretable, and written poorly so you always have a web browser that is trying to process code on the fly that's written poorly on a system that's tied to brilliant hardware that if you just did it right would execute it in the blink of an eye."
