FireFox 3.0 And Opera Have Inbuilt Support For Video, SVG Is Pretty Cool

Update: Looks like Opera also has inbuilt support for video in the upcoming release. Read the Comments below

While you might have heard of Flash, SilverLight etc which are proprietary application frameworks to create RIA(Rich Internet Application) and have been developed by Adobe and Microsoft respectively. But did you know that Firefox has inbuilt support for various frameworks such as SVG, Theora and OGG, which can be used to create and build RIAs.

• Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) an Open Standard by W3C is an XML specification and file format for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated.
• Ogg is an open standard for a free container format for digital multimedia, unrestricted by software patents and designed for efficient streaming and manipulation.
• Theora is a video codec being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies’ VP3 codec, and christened by On2 as the successor in VP3’s lineage, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4 video (e.g., H.264, Xvid and DivX), RealVideo, Windows Media Video, and similar lower-bitrate video compression schemes.

FireFox 3 Added Inbuilt Support for Video Playback

FireFox 3.0 has officially added inbuilt support for the open video format Theora. You can download FireFox 3.0 from here to see the examples in action. For example you can easily use Html tag like the example given below to show a video without the need for installing any Third Party tool to view the video.

Also Check Out this cool implementation of the inbuilt video support and SVG it tries to simulate the Microsoft Surface interface.

FireFox 3 And RIA

What do think happens if you are able to combine all these Three Open Source Standard? I see the possibility of creating RIA based purely on Open Standards.

While SVG has been there for a really long time and FireFox has inbuilt support for it not many use it for animation. I did a bit of hunting around and found some cool SVG Applications. These are built using only SVG hence you can view them only in FireFox.

• Blobular - Check out this amazing demo using SVG. If you play around with it you can see how powerful SVG is.
• Photos - If you have seen Microsoft Surface then this demo will Wow you.
• CanvasScape - How about a 3D game
• An MS Paint Application

source: Mozillalinks