Firefox 3.5 Threatens Adobe Flash with Video Tag

I have been waiting to upgrade to the new version of Firefox. Yesterday I decided to take the plunge and download it. As expected, some of the plugins didn’t work, including Firebug and Alexa’s Sparky (although I then got an update that Firebug does now work with 3.5).

Upon restarting my machine and opening the new browser client, I got into a welcome page where a lot of the bells and whistles are explained. But what caught my attention the most was the fact that the new Firefox supports the new native video tag from HTML 5 which I had read about in the past. The video looks like the still above, which renders a basic video player with a play button, a scrub bar and a volume widget. The video looked fantastic.

I immediately went to look at the page source and peeked at the code. The tag has the ability to switch to different versions of player based on what browser and support you have, but the simplicity of the whole thing is a welcome sight.

Click image for full preview

Of course of all that code, only the first three lines are necessary to render the player on Firefox 3.5. The rest of the code is for legacy purposes.

I tried to open the page on Chrome but only got the YouTube version of the video.

I took a new look at the specs of the video tag, and I have to say, working on a daily basis with video embedding and SWFObject will be a thing of the past. Best of all, the rendered player is fully JavaScript aware, so you can tie events that happen on the player to whatever you need to trigger based on those events. I don’t know how much you can style the player, but I can certainly see a big threat to Flash’s ubiquity on the video player front. If I knew all ExpoTV’s users supported the video tag, I would switch without a beat, and say goodbye to the technically complex code of our ActionScript player.

On a side note, when I tried to add the <video> tag on my WordPress editor, it kept disappearing upon save. Looks like TinyMCE doesn’t support it and erases it after its HTML cleaning routine.

I’ve included the YouTube video below. Hopefully, sometime soon, I’ll just use a video tag.

Tagged as: firefox, html5, video, youtube