Are you just that desperate to get Flash on your iPhone? You may have stumbled across Cloud Browse, a utility that allows you to access the Internet through a remote computer. To me, that raises lots of red flags. Basically Cloud Browse creates a connection between you and a Firefox browser sitting on some computer in the middle of wonder-land. I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to login into my accounts on somebody else’s computers. Plus, it doesn’t even work that great. Talk about something that shouldn’t be allowed in the App Store.
Posts tagged with "firefox"
Cloud Browse May Bring Flash, But I’d Stay Far Away
Matt Patenaude’s Open Letter to Mozilla
Matt Patenaude, developer of Bowtie and Bluebird, regarding Firefox and Ogg Theora support:
“Mozilla’s decision to use Ogg Theora and Vorbis for video and audio (respectively) is certainly admirable: personally, I would love an open codec to gain widespread industry notoriety and usage. The fact is, however, the production industry has already standardized on H.264. Nowadays, H.264 is perhaps the most common codec for Internet-distributed video, with the exception of Flash, much of which is encoded in H.264 anyway.
Content producers love H.264 because it works with their existing workflow tools, and there’s widespread hardware-level support for H.264 on a number of devices, including the iPhone and Android-based phones. The benefits brought by a switch to Ogg Theora — if any even exist — are vastly outweighed (for most content producers) by the time and effort required to make such a switch, and quite frankly, most producers don’t want to be serving up both H.264- and Ogg-encoded content.”
Could you say he’s wrong? You can’t deny H.264 has become pretty much a standard, and Firefox is still missing from the list of compatible browsers.
I think this time would be quite fair to follow the trend.
HTML5 Video, Minus Ogg - Fixing Firefox Video Problems
That of Mozilla’s Firefox not supporting the de-facto standard H264 video format is a well known problem many people wrote about recently. I think John made the best analysis of the situation, depicting the absurd situation Mozilla is throwing itself into by supporting the .ogg format, together with Opera. From the post:
“So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.”
Whether Mozilla will finally understand that H264 is the format to support it’s unknown to us, but - technically speaking - there are some problems that Philip Hutchison over at Pipwerks tried to fix with a simple script. Indeed, Firefox does support the HTML5 <video> tag, but the linked video file should be encoded in .ogg rather than H264. As Philip writes:
“Firefox is essentially forcing people to offer two versions of each video: an Ogg version and an MP4 version. In my opinion — and the opinion of many others — this simply will not do. Providing two different video files is not realistic, Ogg’s quality is inferior to H.264, and many computers and mobile devices have direct hardware support for H.264 but not Ogg. Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless.”
The problem is, Firefox 3.6 knows it can’t play an MP4 file but it loads the <video> element anyway, just because it’s a supported tag. This script will detect if HTML5 is supported, see if it’s Firefox who tries to open it and if so, the video element is deleted and the flash fallback stays there.
But all in all, if Mozilla really wants to stay in the market and keep a good slice of the market share, they need to accept standards and stop rambling about openness with unsupported, inferior formats. I think openness is when you support something widely accepted as a high quality standard, and not when you stick with license-free but unpopular or even closed formats.
Multifox Connects You to the Same Website with Different Usernames
Get Rid of Context Menu: Drag & DropZones Brings Gestures to Firefox
There’s no doubt that gestures-based navigation is a great feature: instead of right-clicks and context menus you can simply move around your mouse/fingers to perform actions.
Thanks to Apple’s multi-touch trackpad and some nice Firefox add-ons, gestures are slowly becoming mainstream: amongst many of those Firefox add-ons I want to talk about Drag & DropZones.
Testing things→
Luc Vandal:
You see, we independent developers rarely get any positive feedback. A lot of it is composed of bad reviews (that are actually support or feature requests) with the occasional pat on the back. I’m also a consumer and, like most of you, I rarely take the time to write a review for apps I use daily. I’m also guilty of leaving bad reviews that may not have been deserved or didn’t bother to contact the developer first. With over one million apps on the App Store, it’s getting harder and harder to have your app stand out in such a crowded market.
This is a good idea. Most people don’t know how positive ratings and reviews can help in the App Store. The fact that users tend to publicly point out the things they don’t like rather than describe the ones they enjoy doesn’t help either. If apps make your personal life or work even just a little better every day, consider using 10 minutes of your time to rate them on the App Store. If you have more detailed feedback or feature requests, send an email to the developers directly. I know what I’m doing tonight. So good.
Launch Mac Applications with Firefox: Quickfire
A little update to talk about a recently released mac-only extension for mozilla’s browser: Quickfire.
Quickfire can launch any application directly from Firefox : simply start typing the first letters in the address bar to get the results from / Applications folder, press Enter and start the application.
Firefox Bookmarks: How Do You Use Them?
I took inspiration from a post on Planet Ubiquity (http://tinyurl.com/9tten8) to discuss a very important issue of our browsers: bookmarks.
Surely you all know what they are, you can call them Favorites, but in the end they are always bookmarks.
As Dicarlo asked ,do we still need bookmarks? Or are they an unnecessary thing of the past, when the Web was still “new“?
Well, I think he‘s right: bookmarks are too Web 1.0.
At least as we have known them until today.
Read more