14 DAY TRIAL // With Firefox 4.0 progressing, albeit slowly, towards a final release, you have to look elsewhere at Mozilla for the most exciting technologies and developments, namely at Mozilla Labs. One of the latest experiments, Rainbow, has already reached version 0.2. The new release adds some support for Windows and Linux and several other new capabilities.
"In the spirit of releasing early and releasing often – we are proud to bring you version 0.2 of Rainbow – an experimental Firefox add-on from Mozilla Labs that exposes audio and video recording capabilities to web pages," Mozilla announced.
The first public release of Mozilla Labs Rainbow only worked on Macs so it's nice to see that both Windows and Linux are now supported. Audio and video recording is now available on Windows while only audio is available on Linux, for now.
Another new feature in Rainbow 0.2 is early support for "writing multiplexed media frames to a websocket." Websocket is a new web technology currently being standardized which supports bi-directional, simultaneous communications between a server and a client, typically a web browser.
Rainbow 0.2 also adds the possibility to specify things like video resolutions, encoding quality, audio sampling rates and channels, with JavaScript. Of course, with such an early release, a number of rather large bugs were fixed in this build.
The Rainbow extension may eventually be integrated in Firefox bringing native support for audio and video recording and manipulation.
While the feature may not exactly be the first thing that pops into mind when thinking of what Firefox lacks, it could be a great, and pretty much only, alternative to Flash for sites which handle live streaming, video chat and other interactive elements.
Of course, there is a long way to go until Rainbow reaches that stage but it could definitely lead to other browser makers implementing similar technologies in the future.