(X)HTML elements, not tags! Please use the correct terminology!

"The inclusion of native audio and video codecs support in Firefox 3.1 might finally lead to standardisation of default media formats on the Internet"

First of all FF3 has tons of new stuff which not a single site uses so far, apart from 2 pages created by the developers of FF maybe.
Second there already are standards, blasted flash is the most obvious one.
And I don't think browsers have the pull to push such standards.

Firefox does not, and likely never will, have enough marketshare to drive the web towards a "standard" audio and video format. It's really too little, too late, with too little infuence. If anything, we'll see Adobe's Flash video become the ubiquitous video format, and audio will remain with mp3 or other clunky formats, likely associated with Flash players as well. This effort might've held some value five years ago, but not anymore.

There would've been a point to this effort back when

as obviously as possible .. didn't name it:
they won't endorse it, ever.

the lobbying won't allow that.

Unfortunately Theora is nowhere near DivX when it comes to quality. No amount of encoder fixes will fix that, it's simply an ancient tech, on level with mpeg-1 but easily outdone by anything modern.

Which leads to a problem: anyone using flash can use h264/AVC, the most advanced (/complex) standard in existence. Anyone using <video> will now have to use crappy Theora.

Either Theora wins and we lock ourselves in Youtube quality forever, or Theora becomes irrelevant in new high definition world and all of this is a waste.
Bad :(

The Real Smartsearch Issue is Privacy, which this Beta do not appear to address.


The question is not just a one switch disablement of the "smartsearch" bar, but also the automatic collection of browsing habit data.

Previously, I found it is possible to hide the bar, but the thing goes on merrily collecting data and storing it, regardless of whether you want the data stored, with no easy means of erasing it.

The bottom line for me: Either there is a easy way to disable the bar and the collection of data to protect my privacy, FF3 is dead.

I will use FF2 until it is no longer supported, then upgrade to something that is supported that do protect my privacy.

Bit funny how everyone makes a huge fuss out of this when Opera has had pretty much been the driving force behind <video> etc and has had lab and beta builds containing it for a few months ;)

Innovation.

A fully coherent multimedia rich web free of plugins and add-ons. That's the world I wish to live in.