I thought this was an incredible leap for online video and could prove to either level the playing field for major video providers like Flash, Silverlight, and WMV or change its landscape entirely. The new Firefox (3.5) now supports what’s called “open video”. In a nutshell, with HTML 5 and Firefox, developers are given the ability to embed video as simply as embedding an image as per below:

Image embed example in HTML:
<img src=”http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/img/tignish/whatsnew/3.5/background.jpg”>

Open video embed HTML:
<video id="video" src="http://www.dailymotion.com/cdn/OGG-320x240/video/x9euyb?key=a99e7056808342ad0868b4decfe811c814044ec"></video>

Just one line does it all and the controls can be skinned by normal CSS! Amazing! My question is - what the hell took so long!??? Before this discovery,

I was seriously contemplating on ditching Firefox for the newer seemingly faster and more user-friendly Safari. I'm probably not the only one when I say that FF has lost it's appeal and has become increasingly slower/buggy. However, this new addition reminded me of what an egalitarian internet world could produce which is why the support of "open source" development is so key to our technological advancement. Competition and capitilism are certainly strong driving factors, but having a free-for-all libertarian-esque platform can empower people to create and innovate without things like business requirements, branding limitations, corporate biases and so on.

More info here:
http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.5.2/whatsnew/
http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/How_Firefox_Is_Pushing_Open_Video_Onto_the...