May 17, 2010 by Simon King
Google Reader released a host of new updates last week including support for HTML5 powered videos and audio.
HTML5 is beginning to build up a head of steam, largely attributed to Apple’s on-going war against Adobe Flash.
Growing numbers of websites are switching to HTML5 interfaces that work on both mobile phones and the desktop.
Google have shrewdly acted upon this reality and intelligently responded by adding HTML5 support for the audio and video HTML5 tags found with Google Reader.
This change is one of many announced by Google Reader over the last week. They have also added a new link at the bottom of recommended items, “not interested”, which allows the user to hide recommended stories that do not hit the mark thus providing Google with more data to give the user recommended results.
Reader Play has also been tweaked with more options, such as the ability to personalise the interface and hit the space bar in-order to move between posts.
The Google Reader team has a habit of releasing these types of small updates fairly frequently, so they have also decided to add a prompt to refresh whenever Google Reader is updated.
The HTML5 addition is inevitably the most significant update, whilst Google is currently supporting Adobe Flash in their war with Apple, but whilst this battle continues to rage on, HTML5 is fast becoming the primary alternative to Flash and we are likely to see many more websites adopt the standard.
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