The Mozilla Foundation has released a new beta version of its popular Firefox web browser and is asking the development community to review the software and provide feedback.
The Firefox 4 beta includes improved support for HTML5, including extending HTML5 video support to the burgeoning WebM standard. This means that YouTube HTML5 videos, which previously had worked only in Chrome and Apple's Safari, due to the massive license fees associated with some codecs, will now play in Firefox 4. This change to Firefox means that soon all major browsers, including the forthcoming Internet Explorer 9, will support HTML5 video in with the WebM codec.
Giving Your Feedback
While the beta does include a significantly different and perhaps Chrome-like user interface, the key thing for web developers to notice is the temporary introduction of a feedback button on the browser's main navigation.
Mozilla would like developers working with the beta release to provide feedback about how Firefox is performing, including how it is rendering pages.
HTML5
In addition to expanding support for HTML5 video, Firefox 4 beta adds even more HTML5 goodness, including becoming the first browser to support the standard's parsing algorithm that allows both tokenization and tree building. Among other things, the parser will make it possible to have SVG and MathML directing to HTML content.
Firefox 4 beta also supports HTML5 sections, like <header>, <section>, <article>, and more; HTML5 forms; and web sockets.
Resources
- "Firefox 4 Beta 1 is Here"
- Alex Faaborg's "Firefox 4 Beta 1 UI Changes"
- "Firefox 4: the HTML5 parser – inline SVG, speed and more"
