February 2011 Archives

GigaOM:

Mozilla released the fifth iteration of Firefox for mobile devices this week, and not only is it a solid app; it’s speedy too. Indeed, my benchmark tests showed a 218 percent increase in JavaScript performance, making for a fast mobile web experience on my Samsung Galaxy Tab. Even the dual-core Xoom tablet gained speed with Firefox’s browser, which tested faster than the native Honeycomb browser.

Android Community:

"Firefox 4 Beta for Android “really” is that much faster" So just how fast is the latest beta 5. FAST!

Android Central:

One of the chief complaints about Firefox for Android has been its speed and size. But with every new release, it's gotten faster. And with every new release, it's gotten smaller.

I've played with all of the developer previews, the betas, and now the release candidate. There are two things I have to say about it. One, it's pretty nice. Two, why doesn't Microsoft give a shit care about half of the people on the Web who use Windows XP?

Requiring a $200 OS upgrade to get a decent browser is either evil or terribly irresponsible. There's just no excuse for a software company with the resources that Microsoft has to abandon hundreds of millions of users like that.

Now, Microsoft says that it's not possible to deliver the hardware acceleration and other features it's built into IE 9 but we know that's bullshit not true because Firefox 4 uses Microsoft's very own DirectX APIs to hardware accelerate Web content for Windows 7 and Windows XP users.

I really wanted to like IE 9 and for the 20-30% of the Web that have Microsoft's most modern OS versions, it's a solid offering. But for most people on the Web today, it's one giant middle finger a slap in the face.

Q. Does WebM support DRM?

WebM is the VP8 video codec and the Vorbis audio codec packaged in the Matroska-like WebM container. It is not the job of the codecs or the container to perform digital rights management.

Flash supports DRM for its various codecs including H.264, On2's VP6, Sorenson Spark, Screen Video, etc. It is not the codecs or containers which support DRM, it is the hosting application, in this case the Flash Player.

There is nothing preventing anyone from building a DRM solution around WebM or VP8. When Adobe ships WebM (or possibly just VP8) in Flash I'd imagine that their standard flash DRM solution will apply to it just like it does the other included codecs.

I do not believe that Web browsers will implement video DRM schemes. Apple's Safari and Microsoft's Internet Explorer desktop browsers both support the HTML <video> tag with the H.264 codec and neither of those applications implement DRM for that video content so I see no reason why Mozilla, Chrome, or Opera would implement DRM for their WebM HTML <video> features.

Q. What is an example of an underdog company having success against an incumbent?

I think that Mozilla taking on Microsoft is a pretty phenomenal story. For the five years before Firefox 1 launched, everyone, I mean everyone (including the people who were rooting for Mozilla) said it was impossible.

When Firefox 1 was released, Internet Explorer accounted for about 95% of all browser usage and IE users numbered in the hundreds of millions.

When Firefox 1 was released, Mozilla employed about a dozen people while Microsoft employed nearly 60,000 people.

When Firefox 1 was released as an Internet download, Internet Explorer was, and had been for the better part of a decade, shipping on 95% of all new computers being sold.

When Firefox 1 was released, Microsoft's annual revenue was about $36B and Mozilla was running on the fumes of its $2M over 2 years initial funding.

There really haven't been many challenges so lopsided as this one that turned out as well for the underdog.

A while ago I started using Quora. I'm not exactly sure what I've been using it for. Some combination of sharing and ego gratification I guess. So, the same reasons I blog basically.

Well, Quora's starting to lose its appeal for me and I've put some data into that system that I don't want to leave behind so I'm going to be reposing some of that content here over the next little while.

It's mostly all relevant to Mozilla, browsers, the Internet, and the topics you all are used to if you've been reading here for any length but there may be a few odd posts coming up that you'll wonder about. So consider this a warning and a prophylactic against "WTF?" comments :-)

This is one of the best "status updates" on WebM that I've read yet. If you've participated in any of the conversations around WebM, you should definitely read this.

On WebM again: freedom, quality, patents