14 DAY TRIAL // A new preview version of the next major iteration of Firefox will soon be out of the oven, with baking time over for the initial stages of integration of WebM into the open source browser. On June 9th, 2010 “I landed Firefox's WebM support on mozilla-central, our Firefox development branch. It should appear in nightly builds from tonight onwards,” Chris Pearce, Software engineer, Mozilla, revealed. Early adopters following the evolution of Firefox closely already know that Mozilla introduced an early Build with WebM support concomitantly with the launch of Google’s project designed to provide an open video standard for the web.
A new pre-Alpha version of Firefox 4.0 is planned for availability later today, or tomorrow at the latest. Mozilla is, after all, one of the driving forces behind WebM together with Google, Opera, Adobe, and many others. The Mountain View-based search giant’s open web media project is set up to define the file container structure, video and audio formats with WebM. Of course, of outmost importance is VP8, which has a real shot at becoming the de facto video codec for HTML 5.
Mozilla has already confirmed officially that work has been done in order to include WebM in the upcoming Developer Preview release of Firefox 4. Mozilla 1.9.3 Developer Preview 5 is currently cooking, and users should know that, despite the fact that the Builds might still be labeled Firefox 3.7, they are in fact early releases of Firefox 4.0. And seeing that the builds are pre-Alpha, and generally just nightly builds, they are obviously designed for testing purposes only.
“Firefox should build with WebM support without needing any extra changes to your build configuration, unless you're building on Win32, where you'll need to have MASM installed in order to compile libvpx's optimized assembly. MASM ships with the Windows 7 SDK, and with Visual Studio Pro. If you've got neither of those installed, you can also download MASM directly,” Pearce stated.
“If you're building on Linux x86, Mac x86 or Mac x86_64 and you've got YASM installed, you'll automatically build VP8 decoder's optimized assembly code from libvpx. If you don't have YASM, you'll fallback to using the generic C code, which won't be as fast, but still performs acceptably. We don't have WebM support building on Win64 yet, you can disable if you reconfigure with --disable-webm,” he added.
Once the new WebM/VP8-ready Builds of Firefox 4.0 become available for download, early adopters can leverage them to try out WebM support with the videos on YouTube's HTML5 Experiment. At the end of the past week, Google released Chrome 6.0.422.0 with support for WebM/VP8 through the Dev Channel. Mozilla continues to work on Firefox 4.0, with a Beta release planned for launch by the end of June 2010.
The first WebM-ready Firefox 3.7 Alpha 4 is available for download here.
Google Chrome 6.0.422.0 Dev WebM VP8 is available for download here.
Opera 10.54 Beta with HTML5 WebM VP8 video support is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 2 Build 1.9.7766.6000 is available for download here.