Want OGG playback within Silverlight, Mono? Now you can. The Highgate media suite, an open source product, does this. It also provides a JavaScript bridge that’s compatible with the HTML5 video API, allowing developers to script it as a fallback to the HTML5 video tag. Given that all the major browsers that aren’t IE already support HTML5 video, this seems somewhat limited to IE/Windows; nether-the-less, it exists and means that there’s another way to play OGG.

Microsoft have joined the SVG working group in order to help iron out ambiguities in the spec, but have kept shtum on whether or not this actually means some kind of commitment to SVG in IE. No smoke without fire, as they say.

In a frank blog post by Adobe’s John Nack, the improvements coming to Flash in 10.1 are spelt out clearly. Less crashes, faster, better on Mac. The key takeaways are:

In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering. […] With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half

Adobe have been getting a lot of flack at the moment as developers bite back over Flash woes in the face of increasing HTML5 support and the iPhone / iPad trying to out mode Flash altogether. The best Adobe can do is be honestâ€”well, the best they can do is make Flash suck less, but the second best thing they can do is be upfront and honest about their plans to solve people’s complaints. I welcome an Adobe who can speak to us this directly and not veiled behind marketing terms.