While many of the benefits of HTML5 have been embraced by most developers, the different browsers currently available to consumers have taken dissimilar point of view. The one thing most people can agree on is HTML5 will make the browser the application that will provide many of the solutions we need to communicate, play, and collaborate with. As one of the supporters of this standard, Mozilla (News – Alert) has been improving each version of its Firefox browser to be more compatible with HTML5.

The latest version, Firefox 28, was just launched for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android (News – Alert) with additions that include VP9 video decoding, Web notifications on OS X, and volume controls for HTML5 video and audio.

The addition of VP9 coding means you don't have to have a propriety application to watch video on your browser. The VP9 coding is part of Google (News – Alert)'s WebM, an open and royalty-free media file format designed for the web with a file structure based on the Matroska container. It is optimized to serve audio and video for the Web by compressing video streams with VP9 and the audio with the Vorbis audio codec.

Changes in the new Firefox 28 include:

NEW: VP9 video decoding implemented

NEW: Mac OS X: Notification Center support for web notifications

NEW: Horizontal HTML5 audio/video volume control

NEW: Support for Opus in WebM

CHANGED: Now that spdy/3 is implemented support for spdy/2 has been removed and servers without spdy/3 will negotiate to http/1 without any penalty

DEVELOPER: Support for MathML 2.0 'mathvariant' attribute

DEVELOPER: Background thread hang reporting

DEVELOPER: Support for multi-line flexbox in layout

FIXED: Various security fixes Known Issues

FIXED: Explore By Touch automatically loading web pages (963000).

FIXED: Various security fixes

As Firefox, Google Chrome and others continue to improve the performance of their browsers by adding more HTML5 capability, it won't be long before free voice and video calling becomes a reality with WebRTC. The hope is all major players in the browser industry will adopt this technology and truly make the Internet a free communications tool for everyone around the world without propriety application that place limitations on it.