- Friday, 10 July 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
Teeth make smiles, and smiles make sales - Unidentified Harrods person in Alan Sugar's The Apprentice
Firefox Beta release date announced
MOZARELLA DEVELOPERS plan to freeze the features of Firefox 3.1 and release Beta 1 on August 19, according to their wiki. Firefox 3.1 has been in nightly Alpha builds since July.
Interestingly and more importantly, Firefox 3.1 now includes Ogg Vorbis audio and Ogg Theora video codec support. The implementation of natively supported and open source audio and video formats in Firefox has been underway for more than a year and is driven by the developers' intent that Firefox 3.1 support the next World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) hypertext markup language specification HTML5, which includes the new "<audio>" and "<video>" tags.
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, which would be a good thing.
Ever since its growth, and as things still stand, the web is sore afflicted by an incompatible hodgepodge of competing, proprietary audio and video formats, including those developed independently by Microsoft, Apple, Adobe and others, and open source software is unable to support them because they're so proprietary.
In an addendum to the HTML5 Draft, the W3C calmly but firmly said, "It would be helpful for interoperability if all browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies." Which pretty well characterises the existing situation for Internet media.
As Softpedia reports, Xiph.org Foundation's Ogg Vorbis is 'a fully open, non-proprietary, patent-and-royalty-free, general-purpose compressed audio format for mid to high quality (8kHz-48.0kHz, 16+ bit, polyphonic) audio and music at fixed and variable bitrates from 16 to 128 kbps/channel.'
Theora is 'a video compression format similar to MPEG-4/DiVX in quality and technical specifications and, even though based on patented open source technology, On2 Technologies, the company owning the patent gives assurances it will never make use of it to restrict the use of the codec.'
It will be good for everyone concerned - major software vendors, third-party applications developers, media producers, web publishers and especially users - if the Internet adopts standardised media formats that are open source and thus free for everyone to implement.
Let software developers compete on perfecting their technical implementations and player interfaces and useability features, so all of the rest of us may simply get on with creating, using and enjoying media over the Internet.
The Mozilla developers' target of August 19 for the next Firebadger is not cast in concrete, of course, and some features planned in 3.1 might not even be completed in time to make it into the final release planned for the end of 2008, but that's their next target date and the first beta release will set Firefox 3.1 intended features, including native media support. µ
L'Inqs
Firefox
3.1 Schedule
Softpedia
Share this:
Business Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
A fully coherent multimedia rich web free of plugins and add-ons. That's the world I wish to live in.
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.
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.
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 :(
as obviously as possible .. didn't name it:
they won't endorse it, ever.

the lobbying won't allow that.
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
"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.
(X)HTML elements, not tags! Please use the correct terminology!