Firefox 3.1 Alpha New Features - Support open video and audio
Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months.
During a status meeting on Shiretoko Tuesday, Mozilla developers said Beta 1, which will be more generally available to the public for testing, is due in August and Beta 2 is expected to be released in September. The Mozill ateam is shooting to ship the upgrade by year’s end or the first quarter of 2009.
Word came down from the Mozilla Summit that Mozilla Firefox 3.1 (codenamed Shiretoko) will support Open Video Format.
The Open Video format support for browser will add few kilobytes to the browser setup but will eliminate use of additional applications. Web developers can add the Ogg Theora compatible videos using traditional HTML tags ( or ). This is great for software developers as they won't have to pay royalties for developing playback content.
Firefox users will derive maximum benefit as the built-in video support will end online video blues. With this development, it's expected that the need to download and install proprietary flash video conversion software will become redundant.
The Gecko rendering engine, which powers Firefox under the hood, also has support for some new CSS options like text-shadow, box-shadow, border images and the HTML5 Canvas text API. The first three are already available in some other browsers like Safari, but with Firefox on-board as well, web designers will no doubt feel more comfortable using those elements in their designs.
Like the Canvas element, the and HTML 5 elements are still in the draft stages, but the idea is to easily embed media without proprietary plugins (like Quicktime, Windows Media, etc). Technically both tags are codec-neutral, but Mozilla has bundled the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs giving you the option to deliver audio and video in an open format.
Firefox 3.1 is looking like it will be a very impressive release, building on and refining many of the best features in 3.0, as well as adding some important new ones.
Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 Alpha 1 introduces several new features:
Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
Text API for the
If you like this post then consider sharing it with others.
0 comments:
Post a Comment