Coming Soon: More HTML 5 Support For Firefox
While it won’t happen for the soon-to-be-released Firefox 3, Mozilla is slowly adding the tools necessary for HTML 5 support. HTML 5 is the successor to HTML 4, for more info see our earlier coverage.
Coder Chris Double is hard at work adding the necessary back end support to the Firefox development code that will allow the next version to support the <video> and <audio> elements.
So far support is there for the Linux version, using gStreamer tools, and Double reports that two new back ends are in progress, “a DirectShow back end for Windows being developed by Chris Pearce and a QuickTime back end for Mac OS X being developed by Matthew Gregan.”
The new back ends will allow Firefox to understand the <video> and <audio> HTML 5 elements and offer playback using tools like gStreamer or QuickTime. Although HTML 5 is certainly not common yet, the <video> element is already in the wild on wikimedia, metavid and other sites.
Apple’s Safari browser and Opera’s desktop browser have both already enabled HTML 5 support in the latest versions. The lone gap in HTML 5 <video> support is Internet Explorer 8. However, even IE 8 may possibly get in on the act since it will be a while before it’s officially released — giving Microsoft time to add <video> support.
With Firefox support in the works, that means that by the end of the year all the major browsers (save IE) will support the <video>, meaning that developers can feel at least somewhat comfortable deploying it in their code.
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