Firefox 3.1 Alpha New Features - Support open video and audio
Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months.
During a status meeting on Shiretoko Tuesday, Mozilla developers said Beta 1, which will be more generally available to the public for testing, is due in August and Beta 2 is expected to be released in September. The Mozill ateam is shooting to ship the upgrade by year’s end or the first quarter of 2009.
Word came down from the Mozilla Summit that Mozilla Firefox 3.1 (codenamed Shiretoko) will support Open Video Format.
The Open Video format support for browser will add few kilobytes to the browser setup but will eliminate use of additional applications. Web developers can add the Ogg Theora compatible videos using traditional HTML tags ( or ). This is great for software developers as they won't have to pay royalties for developing playback content.
Firefox users will derive maximum benefit as the built-in video support will end online video blues. With this development, it's expected that the need to download and install proprietary flash video conversion software will become redundant.
The Gecko rendering engine, which powers Firefox under the hood, also has support for some new CSS options like text-shadow, box-shadow, border images and the HTML5 Canvas text API. The first three are already available in some other browsers like Safari, but with Firefox on-board as well, web designers will no doubt feel more comfortable using those elements in their designs.
Like the Canvas element, the and HTML 5 elements are still in the draft stages, but the idea is to easily embed media without proprietary plugins (like Quicktime, Windows Media, etc). Technically both tags are codec-neutral, but Mozilla has bundled the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs giving you the option to deliver audio and video in an open format.
Firefox 3.1 is looking like it will be a very impressive release, building on and refining many of the best features in 3.0, as well as adding some important new ones.
Shiretoko / Gecko 1.9.1 Alpha 1 introduces several new features:
- Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine
- Text API for the <canvas> element
- Support for using border images
- Support for JavaScript query selectors
- Several improvements to the Smart Location Bar
- A new tab switching behavior
Some of the changes will affect web and platform compatibility. For detailed information about compatibility changes in Gecko 1.9.1 and Shiretoko.
Mozilla Keeps Thunderbird in Alpha
Mozilla Messaging Inc. has taken the unusual step of turning back the development clock, and will rename an impending beta of Thunderbird 3.0 as a third alpha build, according to one of its developers.
Rather than dub the forthcoming version of Thunderbird 3.0 as Beta 1, which was the plan, Mozilla Messaging will instead call it Alpha 3, said Dan Mosedale, a former Firefox programmer who joined the e-mail offshoot in January.
Among Mozilla's reasons for renaming the preview, said Mosedale, was a fear of potentially negative reviews. "Calling something a beta is likely to trigger a bunch of extra press attention that we're not yet in a position to deal with," said Mosedale in an entry to his blog on Tuesday. "Some number [of] reviews will be inappropriately pre-judging [Thunderbird 3.0] based on its current state. In the best case, this would be a distraction."
Thunderbird 3.0, an open-source e-mail client that's the primary project of Mozilla Messaging, has been available in alpha for several months. According to a tentative schedule , Beta 1 was to enter "code freeze" at the end of September, with Beta 2 following in November and the first release candidate in late January.
That schedule will now have to be changed to retool Beta 1 as Alpha 3, and recast Beta 2 as Beta 1.
Mosedale listed other reasons for reverting to alpha status. "We ended up not landing a bunch of stuff for this [Beta 1] milestone that we had initially hoped to," he said. "[And] there is still a lot of highly user-visible feature work left to do." Among the latter, he called out an overhaul of the e-mail client's tabs, additional work on viewing messages, and calendar integration.
After acknowledging that the work so far was not up to typical beta standards, Mosedale said it would be a mistake to tag the impending release with such a label. "The confluence of these things together makes us think that we'll do better to ship this as an alpha and not call down the extra attention that a beta will bring just yet."
Mozilla Messaging grew out of a call last year by Mozilla Corp.'s then- CEO Mitchell Baker to ditch Thunderbird to focus on Firefox, the company's big breadwinner. In July 2007, Baker said that Thunderbird should be cut loose "to determine its own destiny."
Last September, Mozilla Corp. seeded the new venture with $3 million in start-up funds and tapped David Ascher to lead the venture.
Thunderbird 3.0 Alpha 2 , codenamed Shredder, can be downloaded in versions for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux from Mozilla Messaging's site
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