Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox's latest Web browser versions include increased support for the HTML5 Web programming language.
Google and
Mozilla both launched new versions of their popular Web browsers March 22, and
each had something important in common: HTML5 support, albeit for different use
cases.
Mozilla
Firefox 4 was the bigger of the two launches, emerging from several months of
beta builds stretching back to last summer.
In addition to
the obvious speed bumps and the inclusion of the Do Not Track browser security
perk, Firefox 4 has added support for the increasingly important HTML5 Web
programming language.
HTML5 enables
graphically intensive applications without requiring multimedia plug-ins such
as Adobe's Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight.
Firefox 4's
HTML5 support includes high-definition video via Google's WebM V8 codec, 3D
graphics, offline data storage, professional typography, touch-screen
interfaces and the Mozilla Audio API.
"These
technologies are the foundation for building amazing Websites and Web
applications," Mozilla said in a
blog post. Such Web applications would
likely include games that leverage HTML5 capabilities and other graphically needy
programs.
Fresh off of
its
Chrome 10 release earlier this month, Google
launched Chrome 11 to its Chrome beta channel with support for the HTML5
speech input API.
This
API, forged by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium),
will let developers write Web applications for transcribing voice to text.
"When a
Web page uses this feature, you simply click on an icon and then speak into
your computer's microphone," said Chrome software engineer Satish Sampath
in a
blog post. "The recorded audio is sent to
speech servers for transcription, after which the text is typed out for
you."
Google offered
this
Web page to let users try this capability, which
is a demonstration of the search engine's cloud-computing prowess.
Such
capabilities, which are also being tested in speech-to-text translation for
smartphones based on Google's Android operating system, will go a long way to
improving the efficiency of using Web applications.
The newly
polished Firefox 4 and the Chrome 11 beta have other Web tools in common.
Specifically, Chrome 11 is testing
GPU-accelerated 3D
CSS to enable developers to apply 3D effects to Web page content using CSS
(Cascading Style Sheets).
Firefox 4 meanwhile
improves CSS, Canvas and SVG support to enable developers to make Web pages
exciting.
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