The Opera Core Concerns blog has been updated with a post about the upcoming support for native JSON. Now this may not be new as other browsers already support it, but the inclusion in Opera is.

The folks at Opera Software are working hard. On one hand they're working on the increasing popularity of web applications (Opera 10.20 with stand-alone widgets), while on the other hand working on speed (Opera 10.50 probably includes the new JavaScript engine called Carakan).

ECMAScript Edition 5 may not yet be a finished standard, but as a member Opera already is working on supporting it as much as possobile. JSON, which stands for JavaScript object notation (think XML notation but easier to parse), is being included in this new standard. By supporting it natively by the web browser (instead of parsing it through the JavaScript based parser itself), significant performance gains can be made. While no public build is available, the first number crunching results from Opera Software show that the performance is sometimes on top of everyone, and sometimes needs some little tweaking.

Nonetheless, the efforts are certainly welcome, and it's one of the larger collection of improvements that Opera Software has in store. It seems almost like they've awoken from their winter sleep too early ;)