Firefox 3.1 to support video tag Posted on Saturday, May 24 2008 @ 0:55 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck Mozilla Links talks about Firefox 3.1, an update for Firefox 3 that will add a couple of new features like support for the tag, cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) and more performance tuning. Support for the as defined in the HTML 5 specification. Chris Double has been working on this for about a year now and there are even a few experimental Firefox builds featuring it with native Theora (Ogg) support. Whether or not a certain codec must be part of the specification was the subject of a lengthy discussion last year. Sadly, one of the reasons to oppose Theora as a mandatory codec is the fear of a submarine patent that could make browser vendors vulnerable to a patent lawsuit. Support for cross-site XMLHttpRequests (XHR) which would allow more powerful web applications and an easier way to implement mashup. Support for cross site XHR was pulled out of Firefox 3 code due to ate changes to the specification. More power for Firefox 3’s location bar. Mike Beltzner, Firefox 3 lead, talked recently about how the search and location bars could be merged. In an intuitive way. SeaMonkey -and the Mozilla suite before- already does this but the implementation is not the most discoverable. More performance tuning, better system integration. Native JSON DOM binding, a powerful feature for web developers.