Paul Jacobson

If you are looking for a technical post about the intricacies of HTML 5 video and the coding that goes with it, this is really not the post for you. If that is what you want, take a look at the video category page on Mozilla Hacks as well as your favourite HTML 5 resource.

Both YouTube and Vimeo have announced support for HTML 5 video on their sites. This is great news for people who are not Flash fans, especially when it comes to videos online. It is also good news for HTML 5 adoption overall. Hopefully we will start to see more and more services begin to support other HTML 5 aspects like the offline capability (would make Gears unnecessary and enable offline capability for Gmail, GCal and other similar services). My wish for 2010 is to have offline support for my Google Apps. Gears is probably the only thing I miss in Firefox 3.6 and Mac OS 10.6 generally.

I was a little disappointed when I read that YouTube and Vimeo only support Chrome and Safari in their HTML 5 roll-out. My first question was why Firefox isn’t supported. Firefox 3.6 has just been released and it supports HTML 5 video, so why isn’t it on the list. After posting a silly question in the comments to the Vimeo post that sounded like it came from a wounded Firefox user, I read the post and comments properly and linked to this page which talks about HTML 5 video in more detail.

It turns out that HTML 5 video support has a lot to do with the underlying video codecs (the HTML 5 specification seems to be agnostic when it comes to video codec support). Safari and Chrome both support the .mp4 video codec which is what YouTube and Vimeo use on their sites. Firefox only supports (I’m going to mangle this, so apologies in advance) Ogg Theora video codecs which are open source codecs, along with Chrome. This means that Firefox won’t support the HTML 5 capability on YouTube or Vimeo as long as those sites don’t support Ogg Theora video codecs. Chrome is a winner in this area because it supports both codecs. Update: Interesting discussion about video codecs/formats at the bottom of this post.

It struck me that Firefox’s lack of support for the .mp4 video format is pretty limiting considering that .mp4 is practically a standard on video sharing sites like YouTube and Vimeo. It would relegate Firefox to 2nd place, if that, for people who watch a lot of video and may transition across to HTML 5 based video as their medium of choice. I’m not too keen on this lack of support either. I am a big Firefox fan and after a while in the browser wilderness, I returned to Firefox as my default browser in a big way. Chrome is my second choice and I often have both browsers running because Chrome seems to handle Google sites a little better sometimes. Safari is around for the odd time I want to use it.

I did a little research (for a change) and discovered that there are royalties attached to the .mp4 video format. These royalties apply to video creators and distributors. Google and Apple license the technology (H.264, I believe) and can support the formats in Chrome and Safari (respectively). Firefox presumably doesn’t license the codec and therefore doesn’t support the format. Ogg Theora, on the other hand, is open source and no royalties are involved. I don’t know if this is because the royalties are prohibitive (it appears that royalties are going to increase in 2011 when what seems to be a royalty relaxation goes away) or for philosophical reasons (although I am sure that supporting an open source codec is a real motivation, just not sure whether it is the overriding motivation). It would obviously be ideal to see broader support for Ogg Theora from an accessibility perspective but I have read that H.264 offers more flexibility.

Whatever the motivation, video codec support will be one of the factors influencing browser adoption and more and more online services support HTML 5 video. It also either be a catalyst for further decline in Firefox adoption in favour of Chrome (on this front, Chrome seems to be ahead of practically all the other browsers) or we may yet see the Mozilla Foundation vindicated if more and more services adopt Ogg Theora as their preferred format in the face of increasing H.264 royalties and growing numbers of users viewing video online.

You either have to love or run screaming from the hype cycle these days, particularly when it comes to Google and its products. We’ve seen it with hype over Chrome OS (which I regard as very limited), Google Docs (in the context of it being a Microsoft Office killer), Gmail and more. In some cases I think the hype is justified. Gmail revolutionised email with much bigger mailboxes, threaded conversations and dozens of innovations over the years. Google Docs is great for relatively simple document creation and innovation but it is hardly going to replace Microsoft Office in the near future.

Where I take issue with the hype is when it comes to Chrome and Chrome OS. I have already written about Chrome OS so I won’t write about that again but I haven’t really written much about Chrome, the browser. Most of the reports about Chrome say that the browser is fast and it is. It is really fast. I have a development version on my Mac and it loads in about 4 seconds. Firefox 3.6b5, on the other hand, loads in about double that amount of time.

One of the big attractions that Chrome has is that it is extensible (at least, the current betas on PC and Linux are – I believe – and the current Mac dev version is). This means that Chrome supports a range of extensions that extend its functionality beyond the basic browser. This was one of Firefox’s big advantages over Internet Explorer from the start and it remains a big plus for Firefox. The extension ecosystem for Firefox is pretty well developed and varied.

Chrome does a couple other things that make it a great choice. One of these things is how Chrome runs each tab as a separate process so even if a single tab crashes, the rest of the browser continues on. Chrome has done really well. As Duncan McLeod points out in a recent post on TechCentral:

In a short time, Chrome has unseated Safari to become the third-largest computer Web browser. Its market share is still only about 5%, but the speed at which it has overtaken Opera and Safari is telling.

I agree that Chrome is a great browser and it sits on my dock alongside my default browser, Firefox. I have lately been thinking about kicking Safari off my dock (applications I remove from my dock are basically the apps I don’t really see as that essential but are not useless enough to be deleted) and sticking with Firefox and Chrome. Whether Firefox will become largely irrelevant and fade away into obscurity as Duncan suggests it might in the coming years, I don’t know. I really hope that doesn’t happen because Firefox is important to us all, even in the face of Chrome. One of the reasons I say this is because of Firefox’s history:

It is important to remember that Firefox was born as an alternative to Internet Explorer which is possibly one of the worst applications that Microsoft has inflicted on Web users for a variety of reasons, not least of which is security and a disregard to Web standards. It rose out of the ashes of the bloated Netscape browser suite (I remember using the first Netscape browsers – I go that far back). I still remember the excitement as Firefox neared a 1.0 release (I managed to convince my last firm’s IT department to let me use Firefox rather than IE) and I have been using Firefox on and off ever since.

Firefox, to me at least, represents a vital movement that works to improve my Web experience. I have been disappointment with previous versions because of really slow load times (it turns out a lot of this depends on your extensions and, besides, just how fast must the browser really be when loading?), relatively slow browsing and even because it has seemed a little clunky compared to Safari’s simplicity. What I have found, though, is that I have become more and more passionate about Firefox despite Chrome. Chrome is interesting, it is fast and it has a big appeal. At the moment it just doesn’t have what it takes to persuade me to give up Firefox. The dev/beta versions for the Mac don’t have a working bookmark manager, font controls in the Mac beta and there are operating system compatibility issues with some of the extensions (that struck me as weird).

On the other hand, Firefox works pretty much the same on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. The extensions I prefer will work and enhancements like Weave make for a pretty seamless experience between browsers running on different platforms. To paraphrase Apple (ironically given Apple’s and the Mozilla Foundation’s philosophies), Firefox works. I recently had an opportunity to test a Nokia N900 and one of the apps I installed first was Firefox 3.5 beta for the N900.

Firefox is one of the few modern browsers that supports so much HTML 5. I don’t know if Safari supports HTML 5 (Chrome does) but I believe that IE is lagging far behind. I may be wrong on a technical level but it seems to me that Firefox already supports the next generation of offline Web apps and location based services. Its probably fair to say that it won’t be too long before all modern browsers support HTML 5 but I find it encouraging that Firefox has had some degree of support since Firefox 3.5.

I’d be lying if I tried to argue that Firefox has far more advanced functionality than Chrome or Safari. In many respects it does have better functionality or just functionality other browsers lack but most of the differences are fairly subtle and come down to that classic yardstick: personal preference. Despite all the hype about all the things Chrome can do and will be able to do, it is important to remember that Firefox does most of that stuff. In fact, aside from Firefox’s ACID 3 test results (can someone please explain the importance of this test?) and ring-fencing each tab as a separate set of processes, I can’t think of what Chrome does that Firefox doesn’t do, even if it is a little slower. Just as Firefox has innovated in the past and laid the groundwork for what we are seeing now (including Chrome which I believe to have been developed partly by Firefox engineers), it is going to continue to innovate going forward. We should see Firefox 3.6 release in the coming months (Firefox 3.5 was released just a few months ago) and there are plans for 3.7 and 4.0 in the year ahead.

Another aspect of Firefox that has a big appeal for me is the fact that it is developed by a community of passionate and independent developers. In contrast, Chrome was built largely by Google (the underlying code is open source) and I believe it is being developed to fit Google’s agenda for the broader Web. I think I just have a thing for the underdog and despite being the number 2 browser at the moment, Firefox is still the underdog on the Web that also happens to be excellent software. I believe that having a more independent initiative like Firefox that is not so closely aligned to any particular influencer like Google or even Apple is important. Firefox, in a sense, keeps the industry honest with its commitment to Web standards.

Firefox isn’t as trendy as Chrome and I can see the usual trendy folk on Twitter proclaiming Chrome the second coming of Google and the irrelevance of all other browsers but besides the fact that many of them are probably too young to remember what came before Firefox and the impact Firefox had, Firefox was around and thriving before Chrome and will continue to do so as long as there are people passionate about the browser.

Update: I had a couple other stray thoughts. It took a while for them to return to be processed by what passes for my mind (I may keep adding to this list …):

• Firefox has a working and pretty effective bookmark manager that lets me edit my bookmarks – still waiting for that from Chrome;
• As cool as search being integrated into Chrome’s Omnibar is, Firefox’s Awesome Bar is even better (just add search and Ubiquity and its a no-brainer)

Google Chrome OS attracted a huge amount of attention and continues to do so. As you may know it is a Linux-based operating system developed largely by Google and which will be released in about a year.

It is touted as the next Next Big Thing and, like many Google products, it will apparently solve world hunger, water shortages, bring about world peace and make it so much easier to do stuff. As things stand now, the OS is designed to run on fairly specific hardware (SSD and not traditional hard drives, for example) and its apps are really Web apps so it seems that you either need to be online or using Web apps that support some sort of offline functionality. Presumably Google will have updated its apps to support HTML 5 offline capability by the time the OS ships or the OS will have Gears support.

A ChromeOS powered device will be light, fast and will be geared for the Web-based stuff many of us do all day without needing a larger device. You could (and probably would) use ChromeOS on a netbook or something smaller and lighter than your usual laptop. All this is great and mobile workers are celebrating but I just wonder why this is so much better than an OS like Ubuntu Netbook Remix.

ChromeOS is basically the Chrome browser as an OS. Google has boasted that there are so many apps available for ChromeOS already because ChromeOS runs Web apps. Well, so does pretty much any modern browser and given that Chrome (the browser) is available on Linux, why not run Ubuntu on your netbook instead? You have all the benefits of the Web apps through Chrome or Firefox and you have the added ability to use installed apps that don’t require you to be online to use them effectively. You could choose between Google Docs or OpenOffice/Abiword/etc. When it comes to IM, you have a number of options available on Ubuntu whereas you are limited to Google Talk or a Web-based alternative on ChromeOS (did I mention apps aren’t really intended to be installed on ChromeOS devices, as I understand it?).

It is possible that Google will optimise its apps for ChromeOS with the result that ChromeOS users will have certain additional functionality or an improved experience but short of that sort of benefit (ok, and a 7 second load time for ChromeOS … does a few extra seconds or a minute or so make that much difference if you are running an Ubuntu netbook?), I think users are better off using a netbook running Ubuntu or even Windows 7 for a little extra.

There are more benefits to using Ubuntu (I’m going to focus on Ubuntu but Windows 7 probably has similar benefits) on your netbook instead of ChromeOS. For one thing I am not sure that a ChromeOS will be able to support much media on the device running it. I haven’t seen a media application which you can use to play some music you transfer or download to the device. I could be wrong. What I do know is that there are a number of media applications in Ubuntu. I also recently heard that Ubuntu users are going to be able to buy music from Rhythmbox on their Ubuntu machines a little like iTunes or something similar.

Ubuntu users have more flexibility with their hardware requirements and a pretty broad selection of applications, both installed and Web-based. There are probably a number of other benefits I just haven’t thought of yet …

Am I just missing something significant here?

Update: Take a look at this post on JK on the Run titled “What ChromeOS Looks Like as a Primary Operating System” to get an idea what the OS will look like when it releases next year. The video is worth watching!

I have been reading feeds in Google Reader this morning (I prefer Feedly but it wasn’t working this morning for some reason). I use Firefox as my primary browser after being a fairly dedicated Safari user for a while and a momentary Chrome fan. I’m not saying that Safari and Chrome are lousy browsers because they aren’t, they are terrific browsers (although Chrome on the Mac is still a developer build and not feature complete).

The reason why I am a Firefox fan again is that I found the one extension that caused a 20+ second lag in load times (it was a weather extension) and I cut my extensions back to the ones I really like. Many of those extensions are Gina Trapani’s Better Webapps extensions which run on Greasemonkey. One of those extensions is Better GReader which adds some enhancements to Google Reader. One of those enhancements is a range of colours to help distinguish between feed sources. The extension converts the usual Google Reader experience from this:

… into this:

Firefox probably won’t have this edge for too much longer. Chrome for the Mac should be done by the end of the year and version 4 brings extensions capability. It also looks like Gina will probably port her Better Webapps to Chrome too. Better Webapps extensions for Chrome will make a feature complete Chrome a lot more appealing to me although I am really enjoying Firefox again. The one that put me off Firefox initially was its really slow load time. It also didn’t help that Firefox was using so much memory either.

By the way, if you are interested in the stuff that interests me, take a look at my shared feeds page.

(You can probably tell I am a Gina Trapani fan although that doesn’t detract from her awesome apps. She recently published the Complete Guide to Google Wave and is one of the panelists on This Week in Google.)