Firefox 3.5 released

[stoneCold]

Finally the stable version of Mozilla's Firefox 3.5 was released today.

A quick overview of the new features.

My personal hightlights are the HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags, which allow native playback of the open ogg vorbis/theora codecs.


(If you've already installed Firefox 3.5 you can play with the real demo here)

Those HTML5 features are also very interesting for people who plan on integrating Chromium/Gecko powered GUIs in their apps.
In combination with awesomium, for example, you could easily playback GUI video/audio, without having to pay ANY licensing/distribution fees (like you'd have to do for flash video/audio).

Imo these HTML5 features open up some great new possibilities to web developers, and I'm really interested what they will come up with in the future.

FREE THE WEB

[ppClarity]

Flash has the same look on every platform regardless of browser or OS. I hear a lot of optimism over HTML5... how does it enforce consistency across browser vendors?

[stoneCold]

The only thing that can be different across browsers might be the built in video controls, other than that, everything should be the same afaik.

The controls attribute is a boolean attribute. If present, it indicates that the author has not provided a scripted controller and would like the user agent to provide its own set of controls.

If the attribute is present, or if scripting is disabled for the media element, then the user agent should expose a user interface to the user. This user interface should include features to begin playback, pause playback, seek to an arbitrary position in the content (if the content supports arbitrary seeking), change the volume, and show the media content in manners more suitable to the user (e.g. full-screen video or in an independent resizable window). Other controls may also be made available.

If the attribute is absent, then the user agent should avoid making a user interface available that could conflict with an author-provided user interface. User agents may make the following features available, however, even when the attribute is absent:

User agents may provide controls to affect playback of the media resource (e.g. play, pause, seeking, and volume controls), but such features should not interfere with the page's normal rendering. For example, such features could be exposed in the media element's context menu.

Where possible (specifically, for starting, stopping, pausing, and unpausing playback, for muting or changing the volume of the audio, and for seeking), user interface features exposed by the user agent must be implemented in terms of the DOM API described above, so that, e.g., all the same events fire.

(source link)

[:wumpus:]

Most sites will script their own controls using javascript and ajax I guess, so you won't even notice the built-in controls I think

It's a great development anyway, no more heavy plugins or non-standard tags to view video and audio in browsers. Those should be an integral part of the web anno 2009...

[DanielSefton]

http://ishtml5readyyet.com/

As one poster said, I'll be looking forward to writing HTML 5 pages when cars fly and cancer is cured.

[ajs15822]

I heartily agree about the benefits of HTML5's new <video> tag; I can't wait to see what awesome things web-developers will create with it (motion-detection is just the beginning). Besides, Flash has enjoyed way too much dominance in online video lately-- open standards FTW!

As for Awesomium's support of HTML5 video, I'm updating to the latest build of Chromium and it certainly has the infrastructure in place (they're using FFMPEG as the decoder) but I haven't figured out how to enable it yet in my sandbox. I'll keep playing around with it.

[:wumpus:]

As one poster said, I'll be looking forward to writing HTML 5 pages when cars fly and cancer is cured.

Well, if you realistically expect something to solve all your problems, and make everything good and easy for you... of course, that will never happen All development is slow.

[DanielSefton]

Well, if you realistically expect something to solve all your problems, and make everything good and easy for you... of course, that will never happen All development is slow.

It's not the development of HTML 5 that's slow, but even once it is stable and encouraged, you are left with only a minority that can view HTML 5 content. Even IE 8 doesn't fully support it - no <canvas> or <video> support. So, say that comes with IE 9... Even today a good majority of people are still using IE 6 from 2003. It's 2009 now. Say IE 9 is released in 2010, people will still probably have IE 7 & 8 for a good number of years. Not forgetting the fact that IE requires some fancy JavaScript code for the new HTML tags to even work -- so, if the users disable that, your site is rendered useless. I'll stick to Flash video tyvm (99% have Flash installed), and I'm sure I can cope without the pointless <header>, <footer> etc. tags.

Hopefully a decade from now everyone will have access to HTML 5.

@ajs - Oh, HTML 5 will be a gift for Awesomium, because you know it will work for everyone who uses it.

[jacmoe]

What do you mean 'even IE 8' ?
Heck, that browser doesn't even support CSS3..

[DanielSefton]

What do you mean 'even IE 8' ?

Even IE 8 because it's supposed to be MS's "latest" browser.

Heck, that browser doesn't even support CSS3..

IE is the main reason web development struggles to advance.