Firefox on Android – and it'll soon come with H.264 support (Image: Mozilla EU/Flickr (Creative Commons))
In recent days, the tech community has been buzzing around about the fact that Mozilla has decided to relent on its open web stance and will implement H.264 on mobile devices and – although unconfirmed – speculation hints that it will soon be included in the desktop version. But why is this such a big deal? It’s just some stupid technical thing.
After Internet Explorer 9 got some good press for its revamp look, Mozilla – not wanting Microsoft get all the good goss – has officially launched their new version of Firefox, version 4.0. And it’s kind of obvious where Firefox got their new UI inspiration from – rival Chrome.
See something new? Well, you should. Google has now introduced on its mobile versions of Google Docs and Gmail a brand new feature – printing. Yes, now you can print documents from Google Docs and Gmail from your mobile device. Wait, what?
While James and Stewart are out, we get Tom Wood – a former host of a former TECHGEEK Podcast incarnation – to help us dissect the news that Playboy is going to the iPad uncensored, the University of Sydney having a privacy headache and Steve Jobs has gone on medical leave – again.
This, my fellow readers, is the new logo for HTML5. And you may be thinking, what the hell? Why does this have a logo? Well, its to make it easier to identify HTML5 websites – rather than looking up the code – and also does a good job of promoting the new technologies behind the new standard.
It feels like the longest episode so far, but it’s apparently not. Yes, the whole team is back… before they left again. However, not before we go through all the week’s Apple stories that managed to take up 15 minutes of the episode. Yes. You heard that. You might as well skip the 15 minutes.
After showing off lots of Platform Previews for Internet Explorer 9, five to be exact, Microsoft has finally released a public beta for the new browser.
Chrome users will now notice that they should get an update, and it’s a very very big update. Google, along with Adobe, have finally pushed out the in-built Adobe Flash Player in the browser – effectively meaning that you can go straight onto YouTube and play a video without downloading the Google Chrome specific plugin for Adobe Flash, as it will now be in the browser.
Apple might be in trouble with its restrictions after all, and it took them this long? Reports coming from the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission are looking in beginning who will be taking on Apple on an antitrust complaint on developing applications for the iPhone – the main question, however, is who will it be?
Yes, you have read that correctly. In an attempt to show off the power of HTML5 and its GWT engine, Google has created a port of Quake 2 – proving that a lot of people have a lot of time on their hands. Anyway, it is not an April Fools joke, and you can install it and battle your friends (because it is also multiplayer!). However, don’t expect to use Firefox or (the dreaded) Internet Explorer as they won’t work. You basically need Google Chrome/Chromium or Safari to play the game. Why? In a nutshell, they have a similar method of reading the HTML code.
Microsoft has a long history of being non-compliant with web standards. For example, it took until Internet Explorer 7 to support many of the CSS attributes that were commonly supported by rivals Firefox and Safari. However, as speculation that Microsoft may not support new tags from the new HTML5 standard, looks like we were wrong. In a shock to many, Program Manager for IE, Adrian Bateman, said that the next version of Internet Explorer will be supporting the two media tags – <audio> and <video>.
The latest revision to the code that makes up the entire Web is set to drop codec requirements that would set specific formats (codecs) on video and audio files that could allow people to distribute multimedia easier as browsers fight over which format should be the standard.
From the new features comes new things for developers to play around and enjoy in the new version of Firefox 3.5, and because of this, TECHGEEK.com.au will now bring you up to speed what developers can now use in the latest version of the open source browser.