Firefox Aurora: Running Up the HTML5 Video and Audio Score

Lately Firefox has been piling on HTML5 support like nobody's business, and the upgrades keep rolling in.

Firefox's rapid release schedule has stretched the release pipeline into four distinct stages, from most-bleeding-edge to least:

• Firefox Nightly Builds
• Firefor Aurora
• Firefox Beta
• Firefox (release)

Last week Firefox's Jared Wein posted a big list of recent and upcoming enhancements for HTML5 video and audio support, distributed helpfully across these release-pipeline categories. Should be useful to know when planning for multimedia web development in the near future.

Mozilla's Chris Heilmann summarized the new features, in four bullets:

• Firefox‘s seeking is now accurate to millisecondsmicroseconds, there is visual feedback when the video has stalled and clicking the whole video pauses and plays it
• Firefox Beta has specialised controls when you watch video on small devices and watching HTML5 video shows a pleasing background rather than a brutal grey
• Firefox Aurora has fullscreen, statistics overlay, saving of snapshots and controls appearing when the video ended
• Firefox Nightly has a full-screen button, fading video controls after 2 seconds of non-interaction, no loading throbber on audio, error reporting when a video could not be loaded on the video, loop attribute support, and resizing of videos larger than the browser window when you watch them directly

and posted a video demoing three new video features (going full-screen, overlaying video stats, saving a snapshot of the current frame as jpg).

Check out Chris' post for the shorter story, or Jared's for the more comprehensive and technically detailed story.