Native Theora for Firefox 3.1!
July 30th, 2008
Looks like the code to support ogg vorbis/theora playback has made its way into the nightly builds of firefox! This is a really great development! Mozilla’s has announced support for native theora support in ff 3.1. This will have a hugely positive effect on promoting free formats and ensuring current “non-free” formats stay cheep or free-as-in-beer. This is particularly bold of Mozilla in they are pioneering a “more free web” than the standards groups were able to agree on. As previously discussed some industry participation in the htm5 group discouraged a free baseline web video format citing submarine patent concerns. The power of the premier open source projects to ensure support of a free software ecosystem can not be overstated. Mozilla role here is hugely important and its great to see they have taken the right path to ensure the possibility of a bright future for free and open media.
Update: see Ginger’s excellent summary with historical contextualization, Mozilla hacker Robert O’Callahan’s Why Ogg Matters post, coverage on bush coder blog (the firefox video integration branch developer) and Greg Maxwell’s post (one of the key supporters of ogg media on wikipedia)
Entry Filed under: events, html5, philosophy, related, theora
12 Comments Add your own
1. Justin | July 30th, 2008 at 9:47 pm
Fire Fox 3 is great. I didn’t realize that it would be supporting the ogg and vorbis technology. This is great news. I must say that the programmers of FF are really trying to take out IE. I almost use FF exclusively now.
Thanks for the heads up!
Justin
2. David Gerard | July 31st, 2008 at 3:18 am
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Video gives you lots of material to try this out with. (If you have any plugins it tries the video element last, so go to “More …” and you can select the option.)
3. Green Fitness | August 27th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Wow! I am using 3.0.1 and can’t wait for them to release 3.1 for the ogg and vorbis technology. I have also disband using IE and use the IE Tab plugin when needing to go to sites that require IE. The only time I find myself using that feature is when visiting Microsoft sites.
4. brian | August 28th, 2008 at 10:35 pm
I have been using Firefox ever since it was released and lets just say that it is the most used browser today. Devdelopers have been releasing some interesting plugins. I do no see anyone making a switch back to IE even with the new release (8) scheduled to come out soon.
5. organic makeup | September 18th, 2008 at 6:33 am
I agree… Firefox has become the most useful and adaptable browser. Even the most current versions of IE are massive resource hogs and tend to crash frequently.
6. Tracey Jaquith | November 17th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
Hi Michael!
So everyone will know — we plan to have all 200,000 of our movies “rederived” to Ogg Theora .ogv files that “just play” in Firefox 3.1 by the time it releases / end of 2008.
–tracey AT archive
7. Metavid Blog » FOMS&hellip | January 20th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
[...] issues” to get the free format ogg theora tossed out of the html5 spec. While this failed to stop firefox from shipping ogg it has slowed down Opera and given Apple a reason not to ship Theora support. [...]
8. Kaltura’s Blog &raq&hellip | January 21st, 2009 at 4:54 pm
[...] issues” to get the free format ogg theora tossed out of the html5 spec. While this failed to stop firefox from shipping ogg it has slowed down Opera and given Apple a reason not to ship Theora support. [...]
9. Business Opportunity | January 27th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
firefox will always be king of the browser, unless Google beef up their new Chrome and dominate the market
10. miranon | February 6th, 2009 at 7:51 am
I have been using Firefox ever since it was released and lets just say that it is the most used browser today. Devdelopers have been releasing some interesting plugins. I do no see anyone making a switch back to IE even with the new release. Greetings, miranon
11. livecams | February 25th, 2009 at 2:58 pm
I am using Firefox for 6 months and it is much more secure then IE and does not freeze.
12. Julie Woods | June 27th, 2009 at 2:12 am
Nothing compares to Firefox and I have been using it since it was first launched. IE just doesnt work for me!
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